Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It starts innocently enough, as most addictions do. You bring him cake on his birthday.

It’s Jean’s idea; your colleagues are going to draw straws over who will be the one to purchase and collect Harry’s cake, but you volunteer. There’s a bakery on your route to and from the precinct, after all. The woman behind the counter asks if the cake is for a birthday boy and you nod.

‘Oh, how old is the lad?’

‘Old enough not to need a cake,’ you say, a little harshly. In truth, you are embarrassed to say, given you have only known Harry less than a year. The nights are starting to get cold again, the biting cold that reminds you of Martinaise. Harry calls it a ‘held breath’ kind of cold, like the city is bracing herself.

The patissier slips a candle into the box with the cake. The cake is dearer than you expect, but she gives you an almond croissant on the house; it’s good, really good, and you decide you’ll come back. The first hit is always free, you think to yourself.

Harry gets a cheesecake for his birthday. He stares at it blankly when you put it in front of him in the crowded C-Wing break room. Someone takes the lead on singing the birthday song, and the others follow suit, off-key and sans tempo. You’re resisting the urge to cringe as you light the candle for him, but he is welling at the eyes like it's the best day of his life. For all you know, it could be.

‘This is the best day of my life,’ he sobs.

‘Stop crying and make a stinking wish, birthday shitkid,’ Jean says.

Harry blows out the candle, and everyone claps. You’re in hell.

(Judit and Jean are the only ones who thought to give him gifts. Judit’s is a hand-crocheted forest green scarf and matching beanie made from alpaca wool, at which he starts to cry again.

‘I hope you like moss stitch,’ she says meekly.

‘I have no idea what that is, but I love it.’

He does not cry at Jean’s gift: a coffee mug that says “Wine improves with age. I don’t.”. Jean laughs as Harry reads it aloud. You think it's in very poor taste and not at all funny.

‘Very funny, Vic,’ Harry says with a gracious tact.)

Jean must sense your disgust, because he outs you for having volunteered to get the cake. Harry looks up at you with fresh pearls in his eyes.

‘I thought you didn't like gifts?’ he says, and you're surprised that he remembers such a brief remark.

‘I don't like receiving gifts. Happy to deliver.’

‘That’s deeply unfair of you, Kim. Fine, no cake on your birthday then. Got it.’

‘What did you wish for?’ you redirect him.

‘More cake,’ he says. Everyone laughs, including you.

-

The following Monday, on your way to the silk mill for paperwork day, you make a pitstop at the bakery for another one of those almond croissants. Parking your new MC is a pain in the ass, but you’re on the warpath now.

(Since transferring to the 41st, you’ve been driving a Verlässlich Taubewagen, an old Gottwaldian import model hearse, ballpark mid-to-late 30s, and a generous donation from the Faubourg morgue after it got defaced by vandals. At first you felt a hearse was unseemly for RCM use, but with some modifications to the back of the coach–namely, the installation of a cage–you’ve found it’s been useful for transporting other humans, whether they be in cuffs or bodybags. Or your partner in the passenger seat.

It was something of a welcome gift from Pryce, with the caveat that Harry never be allowed to set foot on the pedals. It drives like a backhoe, almost as wide as it is long, with an ass that makes parallel parking a point of pride for you. But it has some charms: leather seats, a flying buttressed gear shift, smooth rounded contours and pop up headlights. ‘Very Disco!’ It was teal when it arrived, and Harry wailed when it had to be painted blue, 41 stenciled on the flanks.)

You end up buying a half dozen croissants. You’re not entirely sure why, you know you’ll never finish them alone.

Don’t lie to yourself, you know why.

Harry (late) sits down at his desk across from you, and you notice him noticing your breakfast. And then he notices you noticing.

‘Can I have a bite of that?’ he says, not a whiff of shame about him.

You push the box toward him. ‘Help yourself.’

His eyes go wide as saucers. A smile tugs at the corners of your mouth like a green horse, and you pull the reins in on that one. Later, as you’re packing up to head home, you open the box to find not one, but only a half of one croissant leftover.

Harry looks out from under his mop of hair with white powdered sugar in his moustache and a sorry grin beneath it.

‘Really?’ you say.

‘You said help yourself!’

‘I did,’ you admit. ‘How irresponsible of me.’

‘I’ve got a sweet tooth,’ he says sheepishly.

‘Really? Just one, singular, tooth?’ you say with incredulity. ‘Which one? Surely, the other teeth in your mouth will suffer identity crises. Before they fall out, that is.’

He shrinks back into his blazer like a tortoise. ‘I’ll replace them, I promise.’

‘The pastries or your teeth?’

‘Both! The pastries first.’

You push the box across his desk. ‘I’m teasing you.’

‘Oh.’ He smiles at you, and you let yourself smile back, just a little treat.

-

Next week, you opt for a rolled chocolate sponge. It’s too big for you to finish by yourself. You eat a narrow slice of it and give the rest to Harry.

‘Careful, Kim,’ he warns you with a laugh. ‘This could become a habit.’

‘A habit of mine, or a habit of yours?’

‘Up to you.’

The following week, it’s a bee sting brioche. The week after that, a Mesque kumquat tart. Not even a week later, fat wedges of Schwarz Gottwald cake layered with cherries. At this point, you’ve stopped eating any of it.

It’s the look he gives you when you slide each box across his desk in the mornings: unbridled cartoonish lip-smacking glee, that’s what you’re really devouring. The high lasts all day, even through the shit jobs, the bodies and blood, the bullets and bludgeonings.

The one time you forget to stop at the bakery, Harry looks crestfallen. You don’t get the look, the delight, and that’s when you realise you’ve created an expectation, and not only for him.

You can’t help yourself, you’re back there no later than the following morning. You don’t even bother looking through the cabinets, you just ask the patissier (you’ve learned her name is Marlene) to pick one out for you. She reaches for an apricot turnover, and you balk.

‘Sorry, please, not that one.’

‘Don’t like apricot?’

‘It’s not for me.’ Marlene picks out a vanilla custard slice instead. She thanks you for coming back so frequently, asks which treat has been your favourite so far. ‘I’ll be honest: none of them have been for me.’

She gives you a sage smile as she boxes up the slice. ‘He must have a lot of birthdays, this lad of yours.’

Your ears feel warm. ‘I think he has been… under-celebrated in his life.’

‘It’s nice to have someone who indulges you,’ she says. She gives you another almond croissant. ‘Indulge yourself once in a while too, officer.’

-

You don't mind indulging him. A little sugar (let's be honest, a lot of sugar, these treats with caloric density that would make you sick if you ate even half as much as he does), it’s nothing compared to his previous vices, the ones he left buried in Martinaise.

Harry has put on a kilogram or several since last March, and at least some of it is muscle but not all of it. Another thing you don't mind, the sight of that. He certainly wasn't thin before, but there was a hollowedoutness to his body. The kind of weight loss that only comes of aggressive neglect, neglect that left behind a sack of sagging skin and hair. He’s filled out again now, from flab to chub, in no small part thanks to you. You think it suits him, makes him look younger even, but he doesn't share your thoughts.

One evening, in the C-Wing men's room, you catch him navel-gazing in the mirror.

‘Does this shirt make me look fat?’ he says while you're mid-stream at the urinal behind him.

‘Yes,’ you say without thinking. Idiot.

You look over your shoulder to see the carnage of a single syllable. His eyebrows are little pleats of devastation. He doesn’t say anything, just sighs at his reflection.

‘Try not to think about it,’ you say, more to yourself than to him, especially with your dick in your hands while he's hiking his shirt out of his pants to palm his own stomach. In the mirror, you see hair, more of it than you remembered, a lush trail made by an especially rotund snail from belly to belt.

‘But I’ve been jogging!’ he moans.

You zip yourself up before you can do any more damage, and wash your hands in the basin beside him.

‘You are fit, Detective. Even with a little… extra, you can still outrun me.’

‘I’ve got longer legs than you, Kim.’

The thought of his awareness of your legs makes you suddenly aware of your own thighs.

‘A fair point,’ you say. ‘I'm built for stamina, not speed.’

‘All of me is built for speed.’ He frowns at you through the mirror.

You fumble for resolve. ‘What I meant was–... that there's no need for you to feel self-conscious.’

‘A pity then that I’m really good at self-consciousness. I guess I should just accept it. That I'm a fat, aging addict. Practically geriatric. A geriaddict, if you will.’

He laughs, you don’t.

‘You’re not an addict. Not anymore.’

‘If only. The evidence is right here.’ He slaps his own tummy. The sound is nicely rounded, a little hollow, like patting a cat. ‘And all I can think about is my next hit.’

You stare at him, a slow shake of your head. ‘Harry…’

He laughs again. ‘Of sugar, Kim. Eclairs. Baqlava. Chocolate. I want it all. Fuck, maybe doughnuts?’ He mumbles something about cop stereotypes while the guilt hits you like a condemned tenement falling in on itself. You did this. This is your responsibility.

No, this man is responsible for himself. An addictive personality is not your doing, it’s not even his. This is normal behaviour for a recovering alcoholic. Actually, you're doing him a favour. Fucking noble. What's to say your little rations of sugar aren't the only thing standing between him and a relapse?

Please. At best you're pacifying addiction, at worst enabling it, and selfishly at that. Bringing him treats every other morning, what were you thinking? You weren't thinking, though, were you? You were busy getting your own fix: his favourite little dopamine hit. You wanted him addicted to it, to this petty ritual you do for him every Monday. You wanted him to associate you with sweetness.

And for what? Some homo-erotic fantasy where you feel the soft, warm weight of him bearing down on you, in you? Consumed by him. Dissolving on his tongue. You fucking degenerate. Don't kid yourself.

You get an urge to put a hand on his shoulder, but think better of it.

‘Perhaps I should stop bringing pastries first thing.’

‘No!’ Harry blurts. ‘I mean… maybe not altogether but…?’

‘Slow down some?’

It’s awful to watch: he's biting the inside of his lip, worrying a tiny piece of skin until it peels off and he’s licking blood from his lips. You get an intrusive wondering if his blood would taste sweet, and you’re instantly appalled at yourself. You should go.

‘Hey Kim?’

‘Yes?’

‘Do you…’

Whatever it is, yes.

He shakes his head, as though he has changed his mind. On what, you can only guess. ‘Nevermind. Thanks for the pep talk, buddy.’

‘Okay.’ You feel something has passed, like a shadow over the ground. You make your feet move before you find yourself standing here in this men’s room until the end of the world.

That night, in the shower, the wondering intrudes again. Your mind is full with his hands palming his own belly, broad hairy knuckles and chubby waist. How would those hands feel on your skin? Would his fingers be rough and callused, or soft and clammy? Your own hands instinctively move across your stomach, your palms following the V-curve of your hips, downward. Your cock is already at attention before you so much as hold yourself. You close your eyes and turn your face up into the spray, listening to the hiss of the water so you don’t have to hear yourself breathing his name.

-

Jean brings a flu to work and you want to strangle him when you realise that you’ve brought it home with you, and yet you can’t help but feel this is some punishment for your self-indulgence. You decide to set an example about it, thanking Revachol herself for the blessing of a low active caseload (Something about the cold seems to slow everything down, violent crimes included.), nothing Harry can’t handle by himself for a few days.

Using the communal phone in the lobby of your apartment complex, you call Jules to let the precinct know you’ll be absent for a few days. ‘Thank you, lieutenant. I'll let your partner know directly.’ You hang up and wipe the receiver down as a courtesy. You find yourself imagining the phone is grateful for your respect, both of it and others who need to use it. You decide not to think too hard about where that delusion has sprung from.

You hunker down for the unending headache and the long snot. You make what you can of it, nap, finish a Dick Mullen (a guilty pleasure, one you'll never admit to, when you need a break from science fiction), listen to the radio for TipTop updates in the lead-up to Zéro Carrousel, nap again, repair a few hems on your shirts and pants, nap some more. By the third day, you are bored out of your goddamn fevered mind, and still no better off.

You look around at the hovel your apartment has become in just days: used tissues on every surface (your handkerchief was the first casualty in a long line of soldiers fallen to the snot), scattered blister packs of medicated lozenges and paracetamol on your bedside, empty takeout boxes (delivered) on the kitchen bench, bins waiting to be emptied, laundry basket spilling over the sides like the jowls of a bulldog.

The mirror shows puffy bags under your eyes, red nostrils raw from too much wiping, weeds of stubble on your chin and cheeks. You smell; you haven't showered in days, the effort too much. You haven’t allowed yourself a cigarette in three days. You look just as tired as you feel.

You’re just putting your head down to nap again when you hear your door buzzer. With a blanket wrapped around your shoulders, you drag your wretched corpus to the intercom.

‘Yes?’

‘Hey sicko!’ Even over the intercom fuzz, you can hear the relief in Harry’s voice. He’s glad you answered.

‘What do you want?’ you say, a little more abrasive than intended, as though compensating. (Your endocrine system has hit the ‘Harry’ button and your dopamine receptors are going wild about it.)

‘Are you gonna let me up or not?’ he says.

‘I’m ill, officer. You would be wise to stay away.’

‘Vic was coughing all over the mill and I haven’t gotten sick. Come on, just let me in, geez.’

You buzz him in, and for a moment you feel compelled to tidy up. It’s just Harry, you remind yourself, he’s seen worse. The moment passes, you hear his footfalls in the stairwell, and then he’s knocking at your front door. You unlatch, unlock and open the door, blanket armour still clutched around you, and there he is, standing on your welcome mat beaming at you like he hasn’t seen you in a month. (A thought chases you, and you wonder what the passage of time feels like to him.)

He stumbles over the threshold. An alarm goes off in your brain until you realise he is definitely not drunk but tired, the hasn't-slept-in-two-days sort. Despite that, he’s beaming at you.

‘Hey, pal.’ He has bags of groceries in one hand and a box in the other. He holds up one plastic bag filled with little green globes.

‘You… brought me grapes?’

‘For the sickie. And,’ he says with a cheeky grin, presenting the white pastry box, ‘a little treat.’

You open the box to reveal a pair of almond croissants. A muscle twitches in your throat and suddenly you have to fight back a coughing fit.

Harry lets himself in and leads you back to the couch with a hand in the small of your back. It’s not the first time he’s ever touched you without permission, but something in the command and force of it makes you feel like it is. Also without permission, Harry makes himself at home in the kitchen, filling mugs with tea leaves, setting the kettle on to boil.

‘Nice place,’ he says.

You look around at the mess, decide it’s better unacknowledged. ‘I’m sorry about the mess,’ you say despite yourself. ‘I promise this is not how I live ordinarily.’

‘It’s fine, Kim.’

He puts a mug in front of you, filled with a herbal blend, notes of chamomile and orange. He sets a second down for himself but doesn’t sit right away, instead grabbing one of the empty Frittte bags to take to task all your rubbish. He picks up your soggy tissues and greasy takeout boxes with bare hands. You’re mortified.

‘Stop that!’

‘Make me, snotbag.’

You can only watch in horror as he swans about cleaning your entire apartment. He laces up your bin liners, takes a week’s worth of trash out to the chute. He washes your dishes, the bastard. Even the laundry, and you daren’t even think of him handling your dirty smalls and socks. Finally, after thoroughly washing his hands, he takes a seat on the couch beside you and nurses his mug.

‘You didn’t have to do that,’ you sigh.

Something catches his eye, and suddenly he’s grabbing the Dick Mullen you’ve left on the coffee table. ‘ Dick Mullen and the Ghost Racer . Ooh, is this the new one?’ He casts you a sideways glance, ammunition in his gaze. He picks up your discarded bookmark–a clipping you took from a cover of MC Monthly showing MotorCorp’s latest sports convertible, the Saber Hirondelle. He does that thing where he disappears from existence for a moment, having some out of body commune with the object he's just touched, and then he comes back to himself. ‘No dog ears. Either you're about to start reading, or you've finished.’

You say nothing.

‘Finished, then. What other guilty pleasures are you hiding, hm?’

You blow your nose for the umpteenth time today. Deeply uncool. ‘Just show me the goddamn paperwork already.’

He looks confused. ‘Sorry?’

‘I assume Pryce sent you here to bring me up to speed. Show me the files.’ You beckon.

‘I think you got me confused, pal. No one sent me, and no one expects you to work in this state, least of all me.’

‘Then why are you here?’

He stares at you with… something. Absolutely unfathomable. He just shakes his head at you.

Harry stays well into the night. He makes you dinner: no lukewarm noodles or cold sandwiches, but a hearty chicken broth with potatoes, leek and mushrooms. Even despite your diminished appetite and lazy taste buds, it might be the most wholesome thing you’ve ever tasted. Something about sharing a home-cooked meal, it makes you sad but in a warm way. It’s soothing in that way that touches on an ancient, proto-human part of the brain, that early stage of social evolution that still persists, still gives some slow-release serotonin as though you're sitting at a campfire beneath a blanket of stars.

‘I didn’t know you could cook,’ you say.

‘Neither did I!’ He laughs, and you laugh, and that brings on another coughing fit. Drop dead already.

You don’t even try to stop him when Harry cleans up again after dinner. You’re laying on the couch, listening to the clink and splash of dishes being washed, to Harry wearily humming a tune that has had too much air time, to the distant groans of water pipes within the complex and the buzz of streetlights without, and you get this absurd notion that you could listen to these sounds for eternity. You don’t remember falling asleep, and you don’t remember Harry leaving; what you do remember is the feeling of a broad hand pulling the blanket up over you, or perhaps fingers brushing your forehead, the sensation of warmth around you as you float, weightless, gliding through the pale.

-

You wake up in your own bed and that mystifies you, but you don’t allow yourself to think about it. You roll over to put your glasses on and notice a full tumbler of water and fresh blister packs on your bedside that you definitely don’t remember leaving there. Getting up, you find you have the energy to do the triple S–shit, shower, shave–before breakfast calls to you. Appetite, you have that back finally.

In the fridge, you find the grapes, containers of leftover broth, and a white pastry box from Marlene’s. You open it to find two things: one half of an almond croissant, and a hand-written note. ‘Sorry, couldn’t help myself! Also I borrowed Ghost Racer. -H’

You sit at your little blowmould kitchen table, chewing mealy mouthfuls of cold croissant. There is nothing in your head, not a solitary conscious thought, but somehow you find yourself weeping, silently, aggressively.

On that Monday night in Martinaise, after you had debriefed with him, after he sagged his way into bed and you locked the door of your room in the Whirling, you slid down the wall that separated your rooms and sighed to yourself: ‘I don’t deserve this.’

You say it again now, and the words may be the same, but they’re fundamentally different now.

-

You don’t get time to go to Marlene’s on Monday. The sound of rain wakes you early, and you’re dressed and ready even before 6am, and a good thing too, when your door buzzes mid-coffee. It’s him, of course.

‘Detective?’ No relief, no smile in his voice this time. ‘Are you well? Triple homicide-suicide.’ He doesn’t even prepare you for it, just goes in raw, and you know it’s going to be a day and a half. No almond croissants.

You nod, mindlessly, before you remember he can’t see you doing it. ‘I’ll be down in five.’

‘Mhm. Bring your cloak. It’s pissing down out here.’

The site is well out of yours and Harry’s jurisdiction, across the tributary, beyond The Cycle, but apparently they, the 37th precinct, asked for you. A sensory assault awaits you on scene.

A lower middle-class neighbourhood. Sleet falls on an idling Coupris 40 with livery from the 37th, steam rising off the engine cage. A crowd of folks mill about cautiously on the sidewalk, behind freshly drawn !Arrêt! tape around the fence. You push through them, politely make yourselves known to the officers of the 37th, and step through the picket gates of hell.

When you enter the house, a familiar smell impacts you like a mime hitting an invisible wall. Harry takes one breath and dives for the nearest window sill. You hand him ammonia (you carry it with you now, specifically for him) but you just have to make do as you’ve always done.

The smell is, well it's The Smell, capitalised. Worthy of its own dissertation. Suffice to say, it's the kind of smell you can know intimately but never become accustomed to, a smell that grasps your entire consciousness and says ‘here I am, human, pay attention, this is it’ - it, being death. The olfactory alarm button of mortality. The last time you encountered The Smell this bad was in Martinaise, of course, and it sickens you more now knowing Harry has to experience this again.

It's his job, you remind yourself, he signed up for this.

Yes, but he has little memory of it still, even months after the fact. Everything he experiences now is just an inheritance of the choices made by a man he doesn't remember, a man who didn’t give a rat’s about him. The time it has taken him to recover is the same time it took you to really nurture a pity for him, an understanding of that duality about him, past and present. You still can’t imagine what that must be like, to have your autonomy stripped away before you’re even born, to be thrust into the wreckage of someone else's life fully conscious without consent. Harrier du Bois was a man who flirted with the idea of suicide, courted her, then fucked her into an ethanol-soaked stupor, and Harry is the man born of that unhappy union. Innocent, fresh, choked by the fumes of existence. Death by over-stimulation.

He handled it in Martinaise, he can handle it now. Still, you’re sorry for him when he pukes about it. He picks himself up, huffs the ammonia, and you press on together.

The scene itself is a fairly cut and dry play of Family Annihilation. The stage is a cramped living room of a modest townhouse. Its players: a woman in her mid-to-late forties, two prepubescent boys and a middle-aged man. Each of them have a world-ending hole in their heads, from which brains and blood have let into the furniture and the carpet; a thick soupy swamp of fluid has birthed an ecosystem of gnats and ants–the heater is still on. The corpses are all bloated, livid, on the cusp of active decay. The curtain fell days ago, and there was no audience. A home radio is still on, playing an endless soundtrack to an empty theatre.

You find yourself standing over the dead man first, observing. The murder weapon appears to be a murder-suicide weapon, evidenced by the fact that the gun–his work firearm, a common Kiejl A9–is still in his hand where he has fallen. You take note of what you can alone, but you're getting ahead of yourself already.

Harry looks to you, pale but stalwart, nostrils glistening. He nods at you, ready to begin the field autopsies.

‘Where would you like to start?’ you ask.

‘I don't care,’ he says, ‘I just don't wanna end with the kids.’

You nod with complete understanding. ‘Would you prefer to fill out the forms?’

He shakes his head. ‘I did it last time it was this bad. Fair’s fair.’

‘Are you sure? There was only the one body last time.’

‘I can do this,’ he says firmly, more to himself than to you, and you feel a swell of respect for him. He’s doing his best with the scaffolding of this life that’s been palmed off to him.

‘Perhaps we start with the one we know the most about.’ You nod down at the dead man, and Harry pulls on gloves and gets to work. He begins with the Stations of the Breath, of course. The dead man has already been identified by his colleagues and subordinates outside as Captain Abraham Durand, Officer in Chief of the 37th Precinct of the RCM, aged fifty-four, a Revacholian born and bred. He is the reason that you and Harry are here and not his officers outside. They couldn’t bear to do this job, not for one of their own.

Besides Abraham’s station, there’s nothing particularly notable about him. Well, nothing you're going to mention aloud, because he looks like Harry. Brown hair and beard, a slight but omnipresent greasiness about him, green eyes unseeing. Even through the bloat, you can see this man was tired. Of it all, it seems. Deep bags under his eyes have long preceded the time of his death, which, based on the insect activity and state of the body since-passed rigor mortis, seems to have been at least two days ago. You check boxes and write notes as Harry dictates until there’s nothing more to be recorded.

Then you move onto the boys, sitting side by side on the couch.

The first thing you notice is that they are twins, no older than ten at the most, and you breathe a sigh; identifying them independently of one another without a family member present may be a challenge. Regardless, one of the sergeants has told you their names are Cédric and César. How deeply unimaginative, you think. Was Captain Durand too tired even to give his sons unique names?

You watch as Harry performs the Stations with an anxious haste. He wants this to be over. The longer he looks at the bodies of these children, the more his own body will internalise this experience, digest and metabolise it so his brain can spit it back out at him in dreams. You can see the wheels turning in his mind, that if he gets through this quickly enough, he can be free of its torture, can simply regurgitate it and move on. You know the truth, that there’s no quick purging of these things. Policework is a war of attrition against the body, small doses of poison taken over years that build a tolerance, but never an immunity, and enough of such toxins will eventually kill you, as it seems to have killed Abraham Durand.

You squat down beside Harry and clutch him by the forearm. He’s clammy with sweat, both hot and cold, and you know this is neither the time nor the place to be aware of it so intensely, but you are, helplessly. You’re suddenly possessed with thoughts of running your hands down the slick of his back, anointing yourself with him like unholy water.

Good God, control yourself.

‘Detective,’ you whisper. ‘You mustn’t rush this. We need to be thorough, or we will miss crucial details.’

His eyes are swimming from the ammonia. He apologises and nods, and you let him go.

You take out a new form, and then another, and he is thorough with both. Amid all the particulars, you make your own notes. You deduce that, at the very least, Cédric and César did not suffer physically: a single bullet appears to have ended both their lives. Two birds killed in the same nest. You don’t see Harry crying, his face downturned, but you can hear it in the clipped cadence of his voice as he answers you at each turn.

Next, their mother, for it’s fairly safe to assume that’s who the woman is. Her body is found an entire room away from the boys and their father, which immediately stands out as unusual to you. You’ve worked one or two family annihilation cases in the past; the mothers’ bodies are usually found laying on top of their children, sheltering them in their last moments of life, crushing them in death.

This woman (Céleste Durand, the officers called her) lays slumped in the main hallway, against a bloodied wall and below a landline, the receiver hanging suspended off its cradle a foot above her. She was trying to call for help.

‘Well,’ you say, ‘that explains why the line was busy.’

One thing about Céleste that arrests your attention: a small tattoo on her inner right wrist, apple blossom. There’s something deeply familiar about it, and you get a wash of déjà vu as you take out the Trigat Sunshine Mini to photograph it. For a moment, you see ‘Lely’ again. After you finish Céleste’s field autopsy, Harry still has a look about him, that face he gets when his brain is still doing some mental gymnastics. He still hasn’t removed his gloves.

‘Tell me what you’re thinking,’ you almost beg him.

‘It makes no sense. Why?’

‘Really? From what I’ve heard, Captain Durand was as hard-boiled as they come, but enough pressure will cause even the toughest shells to crack. The 37th is stretched thin. Perhaps not as thin as the 41st, but we have our camaraderie. The sergeants said Durand was a workaholic, and very private. So private, that few in the precinct had ever even met his wife or sons. A man who keeps an overwhelming work life separate from a demanding home life is bound to sabotage both eventually. Frankly, it makes perfect sense to me.’

Your own words sting you the moment you’ve said them, realising that Harry may draw a comparison to himself: a work life and a home life sabotaged in one fell swoop. Two birds again. But he’s barely listening to you, just waves your words away; you’d think it was rude if you didn’t know better.

‘No no no, not the motive.’ Harry moves into the living room again. He turns off the radio, as though it’s disturbing his focus. He reapplies ammonia and squats by Captain Durand again.

‘Why do it here?’ he says.

‘Where else do you murder your family?’

He looks up at you, a flash in his watery eyes, that huff of frustration that says he wishes you could see what he sees, and so do you. You wish to God you could see through the Harry lens.

‘Why kill himself here, in this particular spot?’ he says. ‘Next to the boys.’

You shake your head, not following him. ‘They’re his sons?’

‘A man who kills his sons has no desire to be close to them. Timeline with me. He comes home late on Friday night, leaves the precinct at 11pm–the last time anyone sees him. It’s his weekend off, so no one expects to hear from him until Monday. The killings have to take place between, let’s say, 11:15pm Friday night and Sunday morning. They’ve been dead too long for it to be any later.’

‘So far so good, that makes sense. Take me with you.’

Mere crumbs of encouragement have him smiling at you, and your chest clenches.

‘The radio was still on,’ he continues, ‘suggesting the killings happened either during the day on Saturday or into the evening. No mother lets her children stay up that late, or else they would have been killed in their beds. And why not?’

‘Why not what, detective?’

‘Why not kill them in their beds? All of them. It would have been faster, wouldn’t it? Neater. Especially with a muzzle-loader. Especially a Kiejl A9. He has to reload at least twice, and that’s assuming he used a single bullet for the twins.’

‘I suppose so, if this was premeditated.’

‘This feels premeditated.’

‘We can’t build a case around your feelings. Where are you going with this, officer?’

‘Look at the placements.’ He gestures at the bodies one by one, first Cédric and César, then Céleste, then Abraham. ‘He kills the boys, then he walks down the hall to kill his wife while she’s calling for help.’

‘How do you know he killed the boys first? I assume Durand is dictating to you as we speak?’

Harry flushes some. ‘No, he’s… he’s not talking, this one.’

‘Then how?’

He gestures to the boys again. ‘No sign of struggle.’ Then Céleste again. ‘And the phone. Dial tone. She was making a call, never finished.’

You can’t argue that. ‘I’m still not seeing your point.’

‘Well, if you’d let me fucking finish, Kim!’

You choose not to be bristled by his outburst. You wait.

‘He kills them here, he kills her there, and then he walks back down the hall to the living room to kill himself? Why bother? Why not just kill himself in the hall?’

You have to admit, something about it was bothering you too, only you weren’t consciously aware of it, and then you realise you were just as desperate to be done with this, just as anxious to close it out as quickly as you arrived. Something about Durand being RCM, even though you didn’t know him, it hits close to home. And if you are already making mistakes, there’s a damn good reason the 37th don’t want their own on this case. Not as cut and dry as you thought.

You sigh. ‘This is all extremely suppositional and circumstantial, but… I have to agree with you. It’s strange.’

‘All that, and it’s staring us right in the face.’ He holds up the evidence bag with Durand’s Kiejl A9 Armistice inside of it. ‘Four kills, and we haven’t found a single bullet.’

At once you feel foolish for not having seen it sooner. Blame it on your earlier distraction. ‘Shit.’

Harry stands up and you see some colour has returned to his cheeks. He begins to do that thing, that emu walk (less of the Jamrock Shuffle and more of his own signature dance with himself) led by his intuition. You decide not to follow him this time, he’ll do this with or without you, and there’s a sting in that too, that you’re not needed at this time.

After a few minutes of wandering through the house, he comes back with a piece of potential evidence in hand. It’s a picture frame.

‘Voilà,’ he says, and hands it to you.

At first glance it appears to be a family photograph, only you realise there are one too many heads in frame. Abraham, Céleste holding two infant boys, and a teenage girl standing, visibly uncomfortable and frowning, at arm’s length beside them all. You take the photograph from the frame, praying for a date, a name, anything on the reverse. Thank Revachol, she answers your prayers.

Céleste, Cédric and César, and Amelie. December, ‘43.

‘This girl, Amelie, she must be in her late twenties by now,’ you say.

‘Someone didn’t like your name,’ Harry says to the photo. You know by now there is little point in asking him to explain his cryptic ponderings.

The house, full of ghosts, does not give up any more of its secrets.

-

When you report everything back to the 37th, in person, there’s genuine surprise at the fact that their Officer in Chief had a daughter.

‘He only ever told us he had sons,’ says a former Lieutenant, now Acting-Captain Granger, the temporary officer in chief. She’s an older woman, in her early fifties, loose bun and flat lips, Gottwaldian accent. Her partner, satellite officer Cartier, is younger and paler but still seasoned, mid-forties; quiet and distant, she keeps her hands folded neatly in her lap and lets Granger do most of the talking, much in the same way that Harry lets you do the same.

Over coffee in one of the interview rooms, you give everything you can to Granger and Cartier, go over your findings with them. ‘In conclusion,’ you say, ‘Lieutenant Du Bois and I believe there is sufficient evidence, albeit mostly circumstantial, to suggest that this is not a family annihilation, and that Durand and his family were in fact murdered. There are leads that need to be followed up on.’

Cartier says nothing, and Granger nods gravely. It must be some small comfort to them to know that their Captain probably did not murder his entire family before ending his own life, but a very small comfort indeed. Granger sips her black rocket fuel and gestures for you to go on.

‘Regarding the initial field autopsies and inspection of the scene,’ you say to Granger, finding it easier to engage her directly, ‘I understand the need for objectivity. This is a sensitive time for the 37th, and you were right to bring in members of the RCM unattached to the deceased.’ You are deliberately non-specific about which members of the RCM. ‘You should be commended for making that call. Regarding the case going forward, is it safe to assume you would like us to continue handling it? Or do you feel the 37th should “look out for its own”?’

Cartier is still silent, fondling her mug idly. You imagine she must still be in shock. Granger is more present. She lights up a cigarette and ashes before she speaks: ‘I feel like the majority of the precinct won’t like it.’ You notice her glance, almost imperceptibly, towards Cartier. ‘But I’m of the opinion it should be handled by the 41st. Durand was well-liked, but he ran the precinct much the same way he ran his life: isolationist. Even when Durand and I were partners, he never gave much away. Dry Durand, we called him. I might be risking too much change too quickly, but if I’m to be Captain indefinitely, I’d like to see some more cooperation amongst other pockets of the RCM.’

You decide then that you like Granger, even if the jury is still out on Cartier. ‘I couldn’t agree more,’ you say.

‘Like you two,’ she says, nodding between you and Harry. ‘The RCM needs more of “The Coopers”.’

She has completely lost you. ‘I’m sorry, I’m not following you.’

Granger pauses mid-drag and suppresses a cough. She’s stumbled into something, something she thought was solid ground but now seems to be crumbling away beneath her. She looks to Cartier as if for help, but Cartier is yet to make eye contact with anyone in the room.

‘I’m sorry, I thought that joke would have found its way around to the 41st by now.’

‘Joke?’

‘Mr and Mrs Cooper,’ Granger says, with visible reluctance.

‘Excuse me?’ you say.

‘It's an in-joke - I don’t know who started it, or even which precinct it came from - about the inter-precinct partners who go around closing cases so regularly it’s like you’re harvesting crops.’

Harry leans forward, suddenly invested. ‘Explain?’

Granger folds her arms. ‘Look, it’s stupid. Someone started calling Lieutenants Kitsuragi and Du Bois the “co-operative cops”. It got shortened to “the co-ops”, then the “coops”, and then lengthened to “The Coopers” and then again to “Mr and Mrs Cooper”.’

‘I see,’ you say, with forced indifference. ‘Why Mr and Mrs?’

Granger goes a little ruddy around the ears, and you suspect that she is embarrassed by the joke, ergo it is definitely not of her making and she doesn’t find it funny.

‘Some officers like to perpetuate rumours,’ she says. ‘I try to discourage it.’

‘What rumours?’ Harry says, and you're relieved you don't have to be the one to press this issue. ‘What do they say?’

Granger sighs. ‘They say the pair of you have a relationship that is… marital in nature.’

‘Marital?’ Harry says.

‘You know, like an old married couple. In sync, despite obvious differences.’

You do not react. You knew this was coming, and you can tell by the tomatoes in her cheeks that there is more that she is not saying. She is giving you the censored version of the joke, omitting the explicit things that other officers have said, the real rumours. You’ve been in the RCM long enough to know what those rumours might be, despite your best efforts to curate a professional image. It smarts to know you haven’t curated thoroughly enough. Or maybe they can just smell it on you. Sodomite. Faggot. And now you’ve brought Harry down with you, pulled him into the swirling vortex of suspicion.

Harry, decorated wayfarer of the turbulent seas of human interaction that he is, simply laughs.

‘Well, of course we are,’ he says through a fit of tummy rolling. ‘Kim and me, we're chalk and cheese. Apples and oranges. We're a cornucopia of attractive opposites.’ The way he speaks, he may as well have an arm around your shoulder, and you’re certain it’s a deliberate tactic that he doesn’t. He’s implying cooperation without intimacy. Sometimes, this man is a genius of the stage.

He meets the joke with a joke and it instantly sets Acting-Captain Granger at ease, a visible drop in her shoulders. She chuckles tepidly. You think you even see a tug at the corners of Cartier’s mouth, but you can’t be sure.

‘Personally,’ Granger says, ‘I think you both set an example of what true RCM cooperation and camaraderie looks like.’

You give her your best professional smile. ‘Thank you, Captain. Lieutenant-double-yefreitor Du Bois and I have a rapport, something I feel is the foundation of a successful partnership, and efficient policework.’

‘I couldn’t agree more,’ she says.

Harry nods, long enough to be considered serious, and then he leans in conspiratorially to Granger and says: ‘I’m Mrs Cooper, by the way, in case there was any confusion. Kim wears the pants.’

It's like witnessing a master chess player deliver a coup de grâce. He has Granger in stitches, so much so that she spills her coffee and drops her cigarette, and suddenly there’s a whole commotion of apologising and paper towelling. With a single deft hand, Harry has simultaneously dispelled the rumour of sodomy and also ingratiated himself with the Captain of the 37th. For a brief moment, you wonder what your life would look like if this man had never picked himself up from the floor of room #1 in the Whirling-in-Rags, and you realise very quickly that you don’t want to wonder about that at all.

You're just about to leave when Harry has A Thought. His eyes glass over and you know it's only a short window of time before he a) says something weird, b) does something weirder, c) has a prescient revelation that no sequence of synapses firing in his brain could possibly conjure without outside influence, or d) he reminds you there's a good reason he's a cop.

He turns aboutface and approaches Acting-Captain Granger. Cartier observes him, and you see her shrink back some from his imposing height.

‘One last thing, Captain,’ Harry says. ‘When Captain Durand spoke about his sons–did he ever say how many he had?’

Granger gives him an odd look. ‘Three.’

Alarm bells go off in your head. If the same is happening to Harry, he plays it very cool.

‘Can you tell me their names, oldest to youngest?’

'Walther, Cédric and César.’

Harry glances back at you, just to be sure you're paying attention; you have your notebook out, and he needs no further confirmation than that. You nod at him, go on, you've got this.

‘Did either of you ever meet Walther?’ he asks both women.

Cartier shakes her head.

‘Only once,’ says Granger. ‘He took Durand to Zéro Carrousel when it was last held, but that was some years ago now.’

You can’t help yourself. ‘Mhm, the next circuit is this year.’

Harry looks at you, distracted, and you realise that, for once, you are the one veering off course. You lower your gaze, deferential.

‘Did Durand speak of Walther often?’ Harry asks.

Granger shakes her head. ‘Rarely. I don’t believe Walther was Céleste’s child, possibly he was Durand’s son from another marriage. We're assuming Walther is the next of kin, but unfortunately Durand kept his contact numbers in his head. For a Captain who made this precinct run as smoothly as he did, he has made this quite a challenge for us.’

‘Would we be able to look through his desk?’

‘Of course. If you think it will help the investigation.’

Granger leads you both to Durand’s office, modest but organised, and unlocks his desk for you. Harry immediately puts the Jamrock Shuffle into motion and starts pawing through the contents of the drawers; you think about assisting, but know you would only get in his way. When he’s on the warpath like this, you prefer to watch. Granger seems to share your attitude, just as fascinated as you are. Well, maybe not quite so much.

It doesn’t take him long, ferreting through the chaff. Amid case files, folders of payroll, leave, outgoings, and all the paper banalities of running a precinct of the Revachol Citizens Militia, Harry noses out a truffle. Another photograph, taken on an instant colour camera, it’s barely bigger than his hand. This one shows a young man, bespectacled and bearded, smiling broadly into the lens as he waves from a crowded grandstand.

‘TipTop,’ you say. ‘I know those flags.’

‘That’s him,’ says Granger, ‘that’s Walther. I remember him.’

‘Pass me the Awkward Family Photo,’ Harry says. You oblige him, already following the invisible path he’s laying with his mind.

You would have to be looking for the resemblance, or else you would never know. The same brown hair, Durand’s nose, strong cheekbones and a square jaw that Walther must have cherished even before his transition. This is the same child.

‘My apologies for misleading you, Captain Granger,’ Harry says, ‘it seems Durand did not have a daughter after all.’

‘But we now have a suspect,’ you say.

For some reason, Harry shudders, so visibly disturbed that he turns away from you, and suddenly you wish you hadn’t spoken.

-

By the time you both leave the 37th, it’s late. Even through the soft patter of rain on the steps leading down to street level, you can hear Harry’s gut grumbling at him. You look at him and nod toward the Taube.

‘Let’s get you home,’ you say. Like he’s a child, or a cherished pet, in need of escort and protection. He frowns at you, and again you regret yourself. You seem to be saying a lot of things that make him uncomfortable tonight. You resist the urge to touch him on RCM premises. Instead, you school your voice to be gentle with him. ‘Come on.’

He shakes his head.

‘Detective? What’s wrong?’

‘I… I can’t go home.’

‘Why not?’

He just stares at you, shreds of the frown still clinging. ‘Kim, do I really have to explain it?’

‘I suppose not.’

Nothing more is said, and you take Harry home with you.

Chapter Text

You drive past Marlene’s on the way home, and look with longing past the upturned chairs and tables into the dark windows, the bakery long since closed at this time of night. Harry is silent as you drive. It’s not the companionable silence you’re used to with him (the kind you cherish), this is the great yawning void with razor sharp teeth kind, intolerable. A silence that compels you to fill it.

You put the radio on, already tuned to that station he loves, the repetitive rotation of interisolary top forty charts. (The agreement was: if you get control of the steering levers, he gets control of the radio.) That one song is playing, some Oranjese pop ballad you don’t know the name of, the one he’s been humming as he struts about C-Wing, the one you fell asleep to him singing the other night. He doesn’t hum or sing along now. You try to whistle the melody, but the tempo escapes you. Harry slouches with his arm along the window, chin propped in his palm.

Forcing conversation is always a last resort, but you’re out of options.

‘That was clever,’ you say. ‘Asking about his sons, I mean.’

Harry doesn't answer.

‘A simple detail, easily overlooked. I might not have made the connection. I'm glad that you did. Now we have a lead.’ You are careful not to say suspect this time.

He remains silent, turned so that you can’t see his face. You want to reach out, force him to look at you. You keep your hands firmly on the steering levers.

‘It was good policework,’ you try.

‘I’m not a child, lieutenant,’ he snaps, and it’s like a splash of cold water to the face. ‘You don't have to praise me for doing my job.’

You pull up to a red light. The sound of the engine idling is loud in the cabin. ‘There are many things I don't have to do,’ you say quietly, ‘but choose to do all the same.’

Finally, he turns to look at you. His face is inscrutable. Not angry, but something else. It's his interrogation face, passive yet focused. ‘Like buying treats from Marlene’s?’

You really can-opened yourself up to that one, didn’t you? ‘Yes. Like that.’

He sighs and runs a hand back through his rain-damp hair. ‘Sorry, Kim.’

‘Apology unnecessary. I was not trying to patronise you.’

‘I know.’

And he's silent again for the remainder of the drive, silent when you’re fumbling with your keys at your front door–Why are you nervous?–silent when you hand him a towel and show him to the shower.

‘The boiler can be sluggish,’ you warn him, ‘but the water pressure is spectacular.’ You don’t know why you’re sales-pitching your home to him. The nerves, probably. He tugs his blazer and shirt off with you still there, and you back out demurely and close the bathroom door behind you.

You were going to feed yourself leftovers, but now you have to feed him as well. It’s been a long time since you cooked for more than just one person. You really have to dig deep for this one, like elbow deep into the freezer. You come up with something on the spot, a soup of frozen vegetables and bacon, and it’s poor fair compared to the mana from heaven he made you the other night. Harry reappears just as you’re turning the gas down to a simmer.

He’s still damp, fresh and steaming from the shower, his hair hanging like translucent kelp fronds around his neck. He has neglected to put his shirt back on, or any of his clothes really (and why bother, he’ll just have to wear them again tomorrow), just the towel around his waist. In the meantime, you have an exquisite view of the freckles peppered across his chest and shoulders. Tiny isolas among the vast expanse of the pale, the little specks and scars that tell a silent, secret history of his life. You quickly realise, as your eyes trail back up to his face, that he is aware of you looking.

He doesn’t say anything, just raises a fuzzy brow at you, and oh, how dare he.

‘What?’ you say, as though he is the one staring.

‘Can I help you?’ he says. Can he help? Can he help ? He most certainly can not help, not when he is the problem. ‘With the food, I mean.’

‘Oh.’ Your ears feel suddenly hot. ‘No. Thank you.’

He shrugs and sits at your small foldout dining table, flips through an MC Monthly you’ve left open there, the one you took the bookmark clipping from. You can see he has flipped to an article on one of TipTop Tournée’s up and coming personalities.

‘Zéro Carrousel is approaching,’ you say, desperation in small talk. ‘Just a few weeks away now.’

‘Mhm. I suppose you want to go?’

‘Of course I do, but I can’t afford it,’ you admit with despair. ‘And even if I could, tickets sold out months ago.’

He doesn’t say anything, staring down at the pages. You put a bowl of soup in front of him, and a plate of bread slices between you both to share.

‘Sorry, I don’t have any cheese to flavour. Lactose disagrees with me.’ Why would you say that? Just shut your mouth already, you’re embarrassing yourself. Harry eats in that enduring silence, and the crunching of toast and slurping of soup is too loud. ‘Detective?’ you venture.

He doesn’t look at you. ‘We’re not at work, Kim.’

‘I know. Nonetheless, you seem to have brought work home with you.’ You realise too late that you have let ‘home’ slip out.

He sighs and leans back in the chair, scratching crumbs out of his chops. ‘He’s not a suspect. Walther. It wasn’t him.’

You take off your glasses, massage your eyelids. ‘Nevermind. We don’t have to talk about this now.’

‘No, you asked. And this is important to me.’ He folds his arms. ‘He didn’t kill his family.’

‘You can’t know that. You can’t know anything at this stage. You haven’t even met this man.’

He huffs. ‘You’re not listening. It’s important to me that you know what I’m feeling.’

‘For god’s sake, this is the RCM–your feelings don’t matter!’

You say it and you know that you can’t take it back, no matter how badly you wish that you could. Harry looks at you with a kind of veiled confusion, as though he has failed at something and he doesn’t know why. You see it in real time as he retreats into himself, into that liminal space between his own brain and the world at large, like there’s a shackle on his mind, and you’re the one who put it there.

‘Shut up,’ he hisses, and though you know he’s not speaking to you, you flinch.

‘Harry–’

As he stands, his towel catches on the edge of the table and falls away. You look, can’t help yourself, and it’s not like you have a choice with him just feet away, his cock level with your eyes. There it is. It’s big. That’s all you can take away from it without your glasses. You force yourself to look aside. It’s not for you.

Harry looks down at himself, naked in your kitchen, and shakes his head. ‘God fucking dammit,’ he sighs like he's talking directly to the towel, its betrayal. He scoops the towel up but doesn’t bother covering himself. Instead, he tosses it at you, and you cop a faceful of soggy cloth that smells of him, sweat and musk. You pull it away and he’s gone.

You’re on your feet before you know what you’re doing. You find him in the bathroom, dressing and gathering his things.

‘You don’t have to leave.’

He ignores you, buckling up his belt. Without your glasses, all you can make out is body language, but that’s enough. Something in his hunched shoulders, you recognise it, and a kind of fevered flexing in his hands. It’s the same restlessness you witnessed in Martinaise, right before he wrapped his fingers around something, a bottle, a packet, anything with a warning on the label. Fuck.

Instinctively, you put your arm across the threshold, barring his exit. As if he couldn’t just remove you. Which is precisely what he does. Calmly, wordlessly, he puts his hands on you, and your body goes all rubbery and pliant, you couldn’t stop him even if you wanted to. He grips you by the ribcage, lifts you like you weigh no more than a cat, and simply displaces you enough to glide past. Whatever that manhandling does to you, you don’t have time to process it.

You chase him to the front door. When his fingers touch the latch, you do something you have never done with him. You yell.

‘Detective!’ It’s enough to make him pause at least. Whatever you say next, it better be good. You approach him, cautiously, dare to lay a hand on his shoulder. He’s so warm. ‘Please,’ you whisper. ‘Don’t.’

He turns. You can’t see his expression. ‘Don’t what?’

You can’t bring yourself to say it. ‘Just don’t. I couldn’t live with myself if I let you.’

‘I’m not your responsibility.’

That stings, somehow more than any of it, and he’s never been more right. ‘No. You’re not.’ Since the morning he stumbled down those stairs and ambled over the mosaic tiles of the Whirling-in-Rags, stinking of piss and wine, his matted hair like a stray dog, wildly conscious of the world and everything in it… and the way his focus narrowed in as he looked at you for the first time, like you were some kind of lighthouse, a solid point in space and time amid all the overwhelming noise and colour in his head. Whether you liked it or not. ‘And yet you always have been, Harry.’

You see the shape of his head moving, shaking it at you. ‘You can’t keep doing that, you know.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Calling me detective one moment, Harry the next. Holding me at arms length, then beckoning. You’re giving me whiplash.’

‘I…’ You can sense you’re being seen . Perceived. You feel naked. You retreat into the kitchen, find your glasses. Your hands are shaking as you push them on. When you turn around, you see Harry leaning against the threshold with folded arms and sharp gaze, something illicit in the way he’s looking at you, almost predatory.

‘I may be a fool,’ he says, ‘but I’m not stupid, Kim.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ you lie.

He shrugs. ‘If you just wanna fuck me, just say you just wanna fuck me, quit fucking around with the treats and all those long, pathetic stares, you coward.’

It’s clear to you now: he opened this can a long time ago. And has been gazing in ever since, swirling the contents without your knowledge. You can't stop the warmth travelling up your neck, your ears hot. He laughs at you, the sound harsh and staccato, and points a derogatory finger.

‘Hah! I knew it! I fucking knew it.’

‘I—’ You force yourself to keep eye contact. ‘I don’t want to “just fuck you”. It’s not like that.’

‘Well, what is it like, huh? Like you said, feelings don’t matter.’

You have nothing. There’s a void where there should be argument, movement, anything. You just stand there like an asshole, witless and thoughtless.

‘I saw four dead bodies today,’ Harry says. ‘Two of them kids. I don't have the stamina to keep doing this dance with you anymore. I’m done, Kim.’

‘Done?’ Your voice is small.

‘Done pretending I’m clueless just to spare you the embarrassment. I’ve had enough of all these little placeholders for your affection. It ends now.’

You’re helpless. You just nod. ‘Okay… What now, then?’

‘I’m getting fucked up tonight,’ he says bluntly, with the kind of finality that says he made up his mind hours ago, long before this conversation, before he begged you to take him home and save him from this decision. ‘I can do it here, with you, or I can do it elsewhere, alone. You want this responsibility? Here, take it. It’s all fucking yours.’

He unfolds his arms, places a hand on his hip, a very unsubtle invitation in it.

You feel yourself swallow. This is wrong. This is worlds away from the night he was here last, caring for you, humming his stupid little Oranjese pop song while he washed your dishes, the peace glazing over you as his voice carried you to sleep. You’re awake now, dreadfully conscious, and he’s scowling at you, waiting. He shifts infinitesimally in a way that says he won’t wait forever. You hesitate, and he turns away.

‘Wait!’

He looks over his shoulder.

‘Stay.’

‘Are you going to fuck me?’ he asks.

The correct answer is no. The ethical answer is no. The only answer that won’t have you doubting yourself, your choices, your integrity, your strength of character, is no. And yet. Without hesitation.

‘Yes.’

-

It’s been so long since you’ve had another human in your bed that it almost disturbs you, him laying there, and that’s putting aside all other reasons it should disturb you that Harry Du Bois is laying naked atop your sheets. Propped up on his elbows, waiting for you to get it in gear. You can see his cock in full definition now: he’s hard, and somehow bigger when he’s hard, the damn thing listing heavily across his thigh, defeated by its own weight. The sight of it should whet your appetite, but context is everything. How did things get here so quickly?

You rarely use your imagination, but using it to fuck him was an indulgence you allowed yourself (more than once) and this? This certainly isn’t how you imagined the scene would play out. You standing here awkwardly, fidgeting with a condom packet while he waits, anger and hunger in his face. You’re stalling, and you know it. Your hands are still shaking.

He sits up, slides to the edge of your bed. ‘Give me that.’ He takes the packet from you, tears the wrapper with his teeth, frees the slick ring inside. He nods down at you. ‘You’re gonna have to take those off, pal.’

You realise, mortified, that you still have your y-fronts on. ‘Goddammit.’

‘Hey.’ He waits for you to look him in the eye, and when you do, that ferocity is gone, replaced with something softer. Patience, if not forgiveness. He puts a hand on your wrist, thumbs your skin. There’s a kindness in it that brings you back, pulls you out of that world where all of this is wrong and shouldn’t be happening in the way that it is because it’s not what you imagined. Kindness, at least, you did imagine that. ‘I want this,’ he reminds you, his voice a low rumble. ‘I know you do, too.’

You breathe deeply, and nod. ‘Can I ask you something?’

‘I can't stop you.’

‘How long have you known?’

He shrugs. ‘Probably longer than you have.’

He's probably right, the bastard. No point in being coy anymore. Just ask him. ‘May… may I kiss you?’

He shakes his head. ‘Not this time.’

This time. The implications of that are so explicitly implicit that you almost gasp. And then you do as he hooks his thumbs into your underwear and slides it down and off you. You’re stood there naked and half-hard with fear, and he just takes you in his hand, stroking you until your body cooperates and your dick begins to realise you’re here, you’re doing this. This time.

‘There you are,’ Harry chuckles.

‘Shut your mouth,’ you hiss, steadying yourself with a hand on his shoulder.

‘If you insist.’ With that, he arranges himself on the bed until he’s level with your hips, and casually takes you in his mouth.

You swear. This wasn’t something you imagined, and a reminder that sometimes reality can be better just as much as it can be worse. You learn very quickly that whatever abuses Harry has put himself through in the past, he has come out the other side with no gag reflex. He mouths you ruthlessly, teases you against the back of his throat, pulls at your hips encouragingly as they surge forward without your permission. ‘Fuck–’

He buries his face deep in your belly, the tip of his nose settling into the thatch of your pubic hair. Then he makes deliberate eye contact with you as he swallows you whole. He holds you there, his eyes welling with water, cheeks going red as he starves himself of breath. You’re throbbing in him. He screws his eyelids closed, moaning around you. It’s too much. You push at his shoulders, and he backs off gasping and sputtering.

‘That wasn’t necessary,’ you say.

Harry is chuckling to himself, wiping the side of his mouth, condom still pinched between his fingers. ‘Got you going, though, huh?’

He’s right. Your cock stands to attention, slick with his spit and angry red, impatient. When you look back to him, he’s smiling up at you, all of the anger gone now, a self-satisfaction about him that he’s done this to you. You sigh, and resign yourself to it, fully present now. You’re doing this.

You take the condom from him and roll it onto yourself, not smoothly, it’s been some time since you’ve done this.

‘Roll over, Harry.’

He doesn’t need to be told twice. He shifts onto his hands and knees, scoots back to the edge of the bed to present for you. His asscheeks are just as hairy as the rest of him, peach soft when you take an experimental handful of him. Out of curiosity, your hand strays down to his balls, cupping them in your palm, the weight of them strangely comforting. He sighs at that.

You hear the wet sound of him slicking his own fingers in his mouth and then see him bring that hand back to rub at his own asshole. You get a perfect view of it, the obscenity of watching your partner finger himself, one digit, then two, and fuck, three. In Martinaise, this would have horrified you–and it did, that one time–but again context is everything. Your dick twitches.

‘God,’ you murmur. ‘You don’t take it slow, do you?’

‘Ain’t my first rodeo,’ he says, pleased with himself.

‘Or even your second,’ you remark, and that makes him laugh. The sound is clear, playful; it helps, knowing he’s having fun.

‘Not that I can remember any of em,’ he says.

‘You’ll remember this,’ you say, suddenly possessed with something.

He looks over his shoulder, assessing you, this sudden ferocity that seems to have passed from him directly into you. ‘You can be rough if you want.’

You just nod. You do want.

He pulls his fingers back and leaves himself open for you. You take yourself in hand and press your tip against his hole. He sighs again, letting his hips rise up to meet you as his shoulders sag into the mattress. He’s an easy gain, little resistance, not too tight, and then you’re inside him. He feels good, that much is undeniable, and judging by the pathetic noise that escapes him, you feel the same to him.

Emboldened, you lean forward, gripping him by the fat of his waist, pressing your weight into him, and gingerly slide down to the hilt until you rest, buried in him. He groans deeply, a shaky little laugh on the tail of it.

‘Fuck me,’ he whimpers.

You fuck him.

-

When you first moved in, your landlord was very insistent: no smoking indoors. At the time, you lied that you weren’t a smoker. Presently, you’re watching coils of smoke dissipate against the ceiling because fuck your landlord and fuck opening a window, it’s cold out, and he’s so warm.

Harry has fallen asleep beside you, flat on his stomach and facing away from you. Every now and then he lets out a muffled snore. Somewhere underneath him there’s a wet patch, and you’ve never seen a man fall asleep so peacefully in his own cum before, but you should have expected this from Harry.

To be fair, he was exhausted when you were done with him. You were thorough, enough to be sure he was sufficiently “fucked up” beyond any desire for substances. He looked up at you through the soggy sweaty curtain of his hair, his brain thrice-fucked and foggy, gave you a placid, absent sort of grin and just said, ‘thanks’, before he rolled over and crashed.

And now your bedroom smells of male sweat and dick, and you don’t remember that ever being so appealing. You run your fingers mindlessly through his hair, pausing every so often to ash. You try to slow yourself between each drag, but you know you can’t make this cigarette last forever, any more than you can stop the morning. Sooner or later the gravity of all this is going to impact you, a world-shattering meteor of implications , of consequences, the future of your relationship (hell, your career) with Harry Du Bois (not to mention the RCM) permanently altered by this single fucking fuck. But for now your endocrine system has the levers; you’re so fluid with dopamine and oxytocin that you can’t force yourself to give a rat’s about what tomorrow Kim’s problems will be.

You smoke this one down to the filter until you taste plastic, and only then do you get up to stub it out. You toss the thing into the bathroom bin where it makes friends with a used (and abused) condom. The shower welcomes you with total knowledge of your sins and washes them away without judgement. As you’re drying off, you can’t help but glance back toward the bed, Harry’s body illuminated by the sliver of light through the bathroom door. It’s only when you put your glasses back on that you realise he’s awake again, no indication of how long he’s been watching you.

He lays there, prone, one arm hanging languidly off the mattress, the picture of tired bliss. His eyes follow you as you come back to bed, and he rolls over to face you when you slip into bed beside him. He shuffles under the covers, but doesn’t touch you.

You put your glasses on the nightstand and turn out the light.

‘Kim?’ he murmurs in the darkness.

‘Yes?’

‘My feelings do matter.’

You breathe deep. ‘I know.’

‘And so do yours.’

He rolls away from you again, and though he’s still not touching you, the warmth of him is so welcome that you wonder how you’ve ever banished the cold alone. You toy with the thought of reaching out, laying an arm across his shoulder, and while you’re busy thinking about that, sleep takes you.

-

When your alarm wakes you at the usual time, you roll over and realise you are alone. Something cold and bitter snakes through your chest until you hear sounds coming from the kitchen: dishes being washed, a kettle whistling then taken off the boil, the squeak of your coffee plunger depressing. Relief, that he’s still here, but then the dopamine is gone, and reality is creeping back in, reminding you that a conversation needs to be had. You sit up, put your glasses on, dress and compose yourself before you face him.

He’s sitting at the kitchen table, a mug in one hand, flipping through the MC Monthly with the other, as though no time at all has passed since he was sitting there last night. You note another coffee mug on your side (Really? You’re already thinking ‘your side’ and ‘his side’?) of the table. The toaster pops, and you flinch. Harry looks up.

‘You’re up early,’ you say.

‘Mhm. Where’s the butter?’

He shoos you away when you try to help him with breakfast, not at all shy of touching you now as he sits you the fuck down and puts a plate of jam toast before you.

You can’t remember the last time someone made breakfast for you.

Bullshit, you can. You’re just choosing not to. It’s too painful.

This is nice, don’t ruin it.

‘Sleep well?’ he asks around a mouthful of toast.

You nod, cradling your coffee. ‘Very. You?’

‘Like the dead.’ He sounds surprised at himself, but without complaint.

It feels natural, this domestic back and forth. And then it feels decidedly unnatural, for feeling natural.

‘Harry–’

He holds up a finger to stop you right there. ‘Case comes first,’ he says, and it’s one of those rare moments where he sounds like you. ‘We can talk about it after hours.’

‘Okay. You're right.’

-

You saddle up for the day and lock the door and leave the unwashed sheets behind you. It’s cold outside, the clinging kind of cold, made worse by yesterday’s humidity hanging around. You have to push through a fog around the Taube, engage the wipers to clear the condensation while you wait for the pre-heater to kick in. The cabin, at least, is warmer for having Harry in the passenger seat.

‘Hey Kim?’ he asks as you pull away from the kerb.

‘Yes?’

‘Can we stop at Marlene’s on the way?’

You glance at him through the rearview and there’s that look, the shy glee. Little treat face. Hello old friend, it’s been a while. You can’t help it, you’re smiling.

‘Sure.’

-

Marlene looks pleased to see you, and then she does a doubletake at Harry.

‘So, Officer Kitsuragi,’ she says conspiratorially over the counter. ‘This must be your lad.’

‘“Your lad”?’ Harry whispers.

You resist the urge to sigh as your ears go red. ‘Good morning, Marlene. This is my partner, Detective Du Bois.’

‘Morning, ma’am,’ he says, tipping an imaginary hat to her, laying the charm on thick as buttercream.

She chuckles. ‘I hear you have a sweet tooth.’

‘Teeth, ma’am. But you know what they say, everything in moderation.’

‘Even moderation itself?’ she says.

‘Ah, a woman after my own heart!’

‘Almond croissants then, officers?’

Twenty minutes later, you’re parked in the motor pool and brushing powdered sugar off the passenger seat. Harry has gone upstairs to update Pryce on the Durand case, given the high profile nature of it. You head up into C-Wing, make yourself known to the junior officers and start distributing grunt work, the priority being: locate Walther Durand. Address, contact, personal history.

‘Medical records may be a place to start,’ you say to the group at large. And then, reluctantly, you add: ‘Please also locate any records of an “Amelie Durand”. They may be pertinent.’ You don’t bother explaining why.

You’re just gathering a few essentials from your desk when Jean approaches, coffee mug in hand and the usual bags under his eyes.

‘What, no treats today?’ he says.

Fortunately, Harry saves you the bother of answering, showing up then with his ledger under his arm, another coffee in one hand, another croissant in the other.

‘Oh, I see how it is,’ Jean sneers.

Harry shrugs. ‘Get you a partner who indulges your appetites,’ he says. The double entendre does not escape you, though it escapes Jean.

‘Must be nice,’ Jeans says to Harry. ‘I used to have one of those, you know. Many, many years ago. Oh, so long ago now.’

‘Real funny, asshole,’ Harry snorts. ‘Here.’ He shoves the half-eaten pastry at Jean’s mouth. He lurches back, spilling some of his coffee.

‘Ye gods, shitkid, you smell like fuck! When was the last time you took a shower?’

You intervene. ‘Did you want something, lieutenant? Besides a half-eaten pastry, that is.’

Jean straightens up, wiping coffee off his jacket. ‘Just to apologise about the flu.’

You nod. ‘Maybe consider staying home next time?’

He looks you up and down, something in his gaze, like he knows. How the fuck he could know, you don’t know. You don’t dare look at Harry.

‘Heard about the 37th,’ Jean says at length. ‘Hell of a case. Good luck with that.’

You nod again. ‘We appreciate that.’

‘We,’ Jean echoes, but doesn’t say any more. He wanders off, and you swear you can hear him mutter something about “Mr and Mrs Cooper”.

-

Back on the motorway, crossing the long arch of bridge that connects Revachol West to East, there's a tension in the cabin as you head back toward the 37th, something strung between you and Harry. It's not uncomfortable, and that surprises you some. The silence last night, that was absence, and it was hell. This, this pressure, it’s the opposite, it is presence. It's an awareness of him, and his awareness of you. Your brain reminding you every other moment: you were inside this man last night. You were inside him and he felt good and warm, and that good, warm feeling of him brought you to climax more than once in one night.

Your mind can't help but recall sensations. Harry rolls the window down while the rain has slowed and lets his hand surf the breeze; meanwhile, you remember that same hand on his own cock, abusing himself sans tempo with the rhythm of your hips. Wind blowing through his hair, pushing it out of his face; sweat dripping down his forehead, fringe clinging to his temples and cheeks. Humming along with the radio; crying your name into the mattress as you buried yourself in him.

A frigid possibility clutches at you, icy fingers at the back of your mind, that you might never feel any of these things again, not with him, not with anyone. Sometimes the worst grief is for that which never comes to pass.

It's ridiculous, you push it away.

You say nothing, let these moments wash over you. It’s not time yet.

-

A few juniors and cloaked patrol officers from the 37th are on site, shuffling around and monitoring. You park down the road a ways from the Durand house so as not to announce yourself like the big dogs suddenly arriving on scene. You tread lightly up the street through the rainwater, make yourselves known to the officers again and they greet you both with a politeness that is clearly rehearsed; Granger warned you that not all of the 37th agreed with her decision to outsource this investigation to another precinct, especially from the west, and especially the 41st. Hell, most of the 41st didn’t agree with it either. It was Pryce’s decision, ultimately, and you respect it.

One of the juniors has tears on her face. An officer approaches Harry, introduces herself as Sergeant Bianco. ‘Mrs Cooper,’ Harry says as he shakes her hand. ‘And my partner, Mr Cooper.’ A couple of the juniors giggle, including the teary-eyed girl. He winks at them.

Sergeant Bianco is unimpressed by the joke, and the lack of humour disagrees with you. At least Harry is trying. Bianco gives you a perfunctory greeting and brings you both up to speed. The bodies were removed–that much was the 37th’s responsibility–taken to the only other morgue this side of the river. She gives you the address and phone number and you make a note to follow up on the coroner’s reports. Ask about tattoo. Something about that detail sticks with you for some reason. A ghost from Martinaise hanging over your shoulder.

Aside from the officers themselves and some concerned well-meaning (if not nosy) neighbours, no one else has approached the house. You hadn’t dared to hope that Walther Durand might just show up unexpectedly, but clearly Harry has. He shows Walther’s TipTop photo to the officers. They all shake their heads, no, they don’t recognise him and, no, he hasn’t shown up.

‘Detective Du Bois and I are going to conduct interviews through the neighbourhood,’ you say, and leave it at that. No instructions for them, you’re not here to tell them how to do their jobs.

You and Harry fall into stride on the path, him walking just a few steps abreast of you like always, assuming your usual orbit together so naturally that it’s almost shocking. Like nothing is different, there is no charge in the air and no free radicals between you, no evidence of the explosive decompression that happened only hours ago. What did he call it in Martinaise? His Volumetric Shit Compressor? It’s compressing, alright.

You let him take the lead on the interviews. It’s what he’s best at, after all. He starts with the neighbours directly adjacent to the Durand house. The brass door knocker is old and weathered, but it’s a brass door knocker all the same. An older woman answers the door. Grey hair, possibly late sixties, early seventies, well but modestly dressed, not quite old enough to have wept for Frissel, not young enough to have raised a fist at the coalition. You note hearing aids in her ears and immediately you begin to lose hope.

‘Officers?’ she says, recognising the white rectangles.

‘Sorry to bother you, madam,’ Harry says, and introduces himself and you. ‘My partner and I are looking into–’

‘Abraham,’ she says, clutching a handkerchief. ‘Please come in.’

You hear a man call out from within the house. ‘Who is it, Miriam?’

‘Police officers!’

There’s a back and forth of yelling (‘What?’ ‘Police!’ ‘What?’ ‘RCM!’) and you restrain a heavy sigh. It’s going to be a long fucking day, asking the same questions, over and over.

-

The Peabodys, Miriam and Moses, have been neighbours to the Durands for over ten years, or so they tell you over an unnecessary tray of tea and stale sugar cookies in their drawing room. Horrible tragedy. Can’t believe Abraham would do that to his family, don’t believe it for a second. No, we didn’t hear anything until the RCM showed up on Monday and started asking questions. Oh, those poor boys, delightful boys, sweet boys. That Amelie, though, strange unpleasant child. Always scowling, slouching. Slinking away.

‘What?’ Moses yells from his armchair. You note an absence of hearing aids where there should probably be a presence.

‘Amelie!’ Miriam says loudly in his ear.

‘Unpleasant child!’ he says.

Harry chooses to tell them that ‘Amelie’ was not present among the bodies found, just to gauge their reaction, and Miriam gasps. ‘I knew it! I knew that girl was a bad egg! You ought to look into that one, officer! I haven't seen her for years, the anti-socialite.’

Harry then flips through his ledger, takes out the photo of Walther. ‘Do you recognise this young man?’

‘Oh, Walther! Abraham’s son from his previous marriage. Passed away, his first wife, rest her soul.’

Harry gives you a look, and you know he knows as well as you do: you’ll get little else from these two old liberal bigots. Still, he tries.

‘How would you describe Walther?’ he asks Miriam.

‘A gentleman. Helped Moses change a tyre on the old Greyhawk before the radiator gave in. We don’t get out much now. He moved away some years ago, but always a pleasure to see him when he visits. Please tell us he wasn’t–’

‘He’s missing, unfortunately. You wouldn’t happen to have any contact information for him?’

They don’t. And they won’t have anything else, but Harry keeps on trying.

‘Is there anyone in the neighbourhood who might know more?’

‘You could ask the Mesque woman in number twelve. Mendoza or something, I think her name is. She and Céleste were close, I believe, but keeps to herself otherwise. Why a policeman’s wife would associate with a ne’er-do-well like that is beyond me. Between us, officers, I suspect she’s Madre!’

You make a demonstration of standing up. ‘Thank you for your time, Mr and Mrs Peabody.’

Harry takes an extra sugar cookie for his trouble.

-

‘Old lady racism aside,’ Harry says as you approach number twelve, ‘what if she is Madre?’

He’s clearly gone down one of the rabbit holes of his thought warren. You don’t have the energy to be annoyed by it.

‘Old lady racism aside,’ you echo, ‘in this hypothetical, suppositional world where Céleste Durand’s closest friend is involved with the densest criminal syndicate in Revachol and biggest thorn in the side of the RCM, for which her husband was a decorated Captain–you have to ask yourself–are we a part of that world? And, assuming this fantasy is true, is it even relevant to the case?’

‘You never know.’

Regardless, number twelve is a box that needs to be checked. The box yields nothing; no one answers the door. You pass Harry a station call form (with a fairly generous window of time for the recipient to appear) and your fingers brush his momentarily. There’s a pulse between you, a beat of intense physical consciousness. If he feels it as strongly as you do, he gives no tell other than a mild shiver, probably just the cold. He slides the form under Mendoza’s door and leaves it at that.

-

The remainder of the morning and most of the afternoon are a carousel. Step up, doorknock, ask questions–Did you know the Durands? Did you hear anything? Have you noticed anyone strange in the neighbourhood? Do you recognise this man?–get nowhere, step down, repeat. 

Only one thing is consistent among statements: no one heard even a single gunshot. Not even a lack of hearing aids can account for that. You see Harry make a rare note in his ledger, and can’t help but look over his shoulder. 

Silencer?

He notices you stickybeaking, and you duck back to your own notes. Silencer possible, you write.

-

By the time you’re done canvassing this tired lower middle-class neighbourhood, the only thing you come away with is sore, wet feet. The rain feels like it has soaked down to the bone after hours of pushing through it. Even the shelter of the Taube is no relief, the cold has set in now that it’s dark.

Harry radios in to the 41st and then to the 37th to see if any of the grunts have unearthed any contact info or records for Walther Durand. Nothing, but Granger briefly checks in.

‘I understand it’s going to be taxing on both your time and your fuel,’ Granger says, ‘driving back and forth across the bridge every day that you continue to investigate for us. I’ve made arrangements with a hotel near the precinct, and they’re prepared to comp a room for you both.’

You and Harry exchange a glance.

‘Both, or each?’ he says into the mic with a feigned indifference.

‘One room, singular,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry, it was the best I could do. I’m told there’s a sofa bed as well as a double, though.’

‘That’s very thoughtful, Captain,’ you say. ‘Thank you.’

‘Least I could do. Come by the station and I’ll have the key brought down to you.’

The radio clicks off.

‘Are we done here?’ you ask, but Harry isn’t listening. He’s shivering, but doesn’t seem aware of himself doing so, staring at a clogged stormwater drain further up the road toward the Durand house. Runoff gushes past and over the grate, a little pool of muddy water in the road depression, sparkling under the streetlight.

Harry starts taking off his clothes.

‘What are you–’ No, there’s no point.

He takes off his jacket, then his shirt, then his pants and finally his shoes and socks. Only his briefs remain. Then he tracks up the street, wades into the little pool. It’s barely a few inches deep, but those few inches are enough to obscure half his face as he lays down belly-flat on the road and reaches into the drain.

You clock the patrol officers noticing him, and the seconds pass like hours as they point and mutter to each other while he drain dives. Frustration flashes across his face, and he digs deeper, fully submerging his face in the water. You jump out of the Taube, leaving it unlocked as you sprint up the street.

‘Get out of there!’ Either he doesn’t hear you, or he ignores you. ‘Detective!’ It’s the second time in twenty-four hours that you have yelled at him.

He lifts his sopping head out of the water and gasps for air. ‘Almost got it.’ He takes a gulping breath, goes under again. Finally, finally , he seems to take a hold of something, and gives a mighty effort to pull it out.

Suddenly, there’s a great sucking and gurgling noise, as of a passage opening up, and the water immediately begins to whirlpool into the drain. The worst of it has cleared even before Harry stands up, filthy, a dripping wet t-shirt in his hand. The patrol officers have gathered like flies around shit. Harry unfolds the shirt. It’s small, probably a woman’s, and probably part of a uniform, a simple logo–“Maria’s”–written across the chest in cursive font. You can barely see it through the rain licking your lenses.

‘All that,’ you say, ‘and it’s not even your size.’

‘Kim.’

‘What?’

‘Kim, there’s blood on this.’

He’s right. It’s brown, and it’s several days’ dried, and that’s probably what saved it from being soaked away by the rain, an unmistakable stain. Almost nothing gets that out of white cotton jersey.

One of the patrol officers hands you an evidence bag.

-

Back at the 37th, Harry apologises to anyone he can for dripping muddy water over the floor. He shuffles around sheepishly, looking like he pissed his pants (not having been game to take his underpants off before putting the rest of his clothes back on), while you deliver the shirt. The guys in processing say they’ll be lucky to get even a blood type from the shirt, but it’s worth a try at least.

You pick up the key and address for the hotel ( La Belle Poule , there’s a little chicken on the keyring) from the juniors at the front desk. Harry apologises to them as well on the way out.

No sense in going to the hotel without so much as a change of clothes, and Harry’s need is even more dire than yours. He stinks of mud and yesterday’s sex and dried blood. It’s causing some volatile and conflicting responses in you.

You get back on the motorway westbound, and of course there’s traffic at this time of night. At first it’s a fucking crawl, and then it’s an open air parking garage filled with the sounds of idling motors, the occasional honk. A DJ on Harry’s pop station tells you it’s nine o’clock, and then lays down a slow, acoustic ballad by a solo artist from Mesque. It’s minor key, and very sad, though you can’t understand the words. Harry clearly likes it, trying to follow the melody with little ‘lala’s and ‘wo-oh’s in place of the lyrics he can’t sing.

‘It’s after hours,’ you force yourself to say. You hate initiating, you always have, but you want this plaster ripped off.

‘We can talk now, if you like,’ he prompts.

‘Okay.’

‘Right.’

There’s a beat of silence, and then a trial of awkwardness where you both go to speak, both back off, both gesture for the other to begin. ‘No, you go.’ ‘No, you first.’ ‘I insist.’ ‘Please, after you.’

You sigh. ‘Look, I think we should... set some boundaries.’

After a moment of consideration, Harry nods. ‘I agree.’

‘What happened last night…’ You swallow. ‘It should not have happened.’

You can sense Harry scrutinising every little twitch in your facial muscles. Somehow, it doesn’t bother you. ‘Should not have happened at all?’ he says. ‘Or should not have happened in the way that it did?’

Outside, it begins to rain again, a legato melody on the metal roof of the cabin. Lights of passing MCs on the other side of the motorway cast a soft glow over the dashboard, tiny haloes through the rain. You take your glasses off to rub your eyes against the clarity of it all, just until the traffic starts inching again, and then you put them back on.

‘I suppose,’ you begin carefully, ‘it all depends on perspective. From the perspective of a lieutenant of the RCM who slept with his partner? Definitely should not have happened.’

‘It’s after hours,’ Harry reminds you.

‘It is.’

‘So, from the perspective of Kim? Just Kim.’

‘From my perspective,’ you say, ‘it wasn’t… Let’s say it wasn’t how I would have preferred to experience intimacy with– with you.’

‘That wasn’t intimacy,’ he says bluntly. ‘That wasn’t intimate at all.’

‘No, it was not.’

‘And… intimacy is what you wanted,’ he deduces.

You say nothing.

‘Ah, I see,’ he says. ‘I think I understand now. You should know I’m… not good at that, Kim.’

You nod heavily. ‘Detective, I believe I can move past this if you can.’ You clear your throat for the speech you’ve been rehearsing in your head all day. ‘We can metabolise this experience as part of our partnership, accept it and move on. It does not have to change our professional relationship, and we can remain as we are. We do good, important work together, and I would hate for a… speedbump to throw us off course.’

Harry is silent for a moment longer, as though he’s waiting for you to stop talking.

‘Detective?’ you venture.

‘It’s after hours ,’ he reminds you again.

The traffic dies off to a stop, long enough for you to look at him. There’s a pleat in his brow, a kind of worry there. ‘Harry?’

He licks his lips like he’s tasting the words he’s about to push past them. ‘I’m not good at intimacy,’ he repeats, a little bitter. ‘I’m rubbish at it, apparently.’

‘I’m not asking you for–’

‘But if there’s one thing I am good at, it’s trying again. And again. And however many times it takes until I get it right.’ Something in your belly braces, as if for a punch to the gut. ‘But you have to weigh up all those thoughts in your head and feelings in your gut, and make a decision, and tell me if that’s something you want me to do. Because I’m not going to waste my time even making an attempt if you don’t want me to. You have to decide who you want to be around me: the Lieutenant, or Kim.’

You’re speechless.

He waits for you. He waits for moments on end, precisely opposite to last night when he wouldn’t wait even a second for you to make up your mind.

‘Can I have both?’ you ask. ‘I want to be both.’

‘You can be both if you think you can,’ he permits. ‘Do you want me to be both as well?’

‘Yes,’ you breathe. ‘I want that, too.’

‘And which do you want right now?’

‘I want to be Kim,’ you say. ‘And I want you to be Harry.’

‘Okay.’ He sounds relieved.

‘Okay.’ So do you.

You wait for… something. For a touch, a word, a noise, anything that marks this shifting of your relationship from one place to another. But there’s nothing, you’re exactly as you were before, sitting in a hearse with your soggy, smelly partner just inches away from you. You want to reach out, touch him, but you’re no less shackled to the levers than you were a moment ago.

‘I’ve only known Harry less than a year,’ he says, ‘but I’ll try.’

‘That’s okay. I’ve only known Harry for less than a year as well.’ You smile. There’s something tender in that, that you have been with him this entire life thus far.

‘So,’ he says, ‘Boundaries. How about I say one, and then you say one?’

You nod. ‘That seems fair.’

‘First, I need you to stop treating me like I’m a child. Even if I’m absolutely behaving like one.’ You can hear the self-deprecating humour in his voice, and it makes you smile again, just a little.

‘Understood. Treat you as you should behave: like an adult.’

‘Sounds good. Now you.’

You dig deeply for this one, force yourself to make eye contact while you can, and he’s there waiting for it, patience in his grey green eyes. ‘This is important, Harry. Don’t ever, ever , weaponise addiction against me like you did last night. Do not ever put me in a position where I have to be the thing that stands between you and relapse. And do not ever use sex as a bargaining tool.’

His eyes waver, shame there now. He shuffles in his seat, and the leather makes a wet noise you’ll just have to worry about later. ‘You’re right. That was fucked up.’

‘So fucked up.’

‘Extremely fucked up. I’m sorry I did that, Kim, truly. I knew it was wrong, and I still did it.’

‘It was wrong. And I still said yes to it. I made that choice.’

‘I’m sorry I forced you to make that choice. I’m sorry it happened that way.’ He looks to you, a plea in the line of his mouth. ‘But I’m not sorry that it happened. Not sorry we’re here now having this conversation about it.’

‘I forgive you.’ And you do. ‘And you were right, you are not my responsibility. So don’t push that on me ever again either.’

He nods. ‘I promise. But… What if I fuck up? What if I do relapse? I can’t promise that won’t happen. What then? Do I get three strikes or am I out straight away?’

You expected this part of the conversation; it’s necessary, if painful for him, and you recognise the effort it must be taxing him to ask these questions. You won’t shy away from it. ‘That is your responsibility, recovery. But I’m not going to put numbers on something that is inherently non-linear. We cross that bridge when we come to it, if we come to it. And if we do… Well, I’ve seen you at your worst, and we still ended up here.’ The traffic starts moving again, and you have to focus on the road.

From the corner of your eye, you can see him giving you his crooked smile. ‘You helped a lot. In Martinaise, I mean. And since then. More than you know.’ He shakes his head. ‘Sorry, you said not to put you in that place, and I’ve already fucking done it. God. Right out the gate, I’ve fucked up.’

You have to touch him now, you can’t bear it anymore. You let go of one of the levers just for a moment. You pull your glove off with your teeth, then finally you reach out, just a hand on his bare forearm, skin on skin. The hairs on his arm are thick and soft, and you can feel them stand to attention as he breaks out in goosebumps.

‘I can still help,’ you murmur, and then take the lever again. ‘There is no boundary there.’

He looks at you for the longest time, and you find you’re comfortable in his gaze. You smile at the road, and hope he knows it’s for him.

‘Your turn,’ you say.

He says nothing for a little while, and you can almost hear him stuck in that feedback loop of inner dialogue that he has with himself. It’s kind of charming. And then he comes back to himself with a start. ‘Right, yes. Uhm. I don’t know, I think that was all I had, boundary-wise. Oh, one request maybe?’

‘Go on.’

‘Please don’t ever quit with the treats? I know I said to stop. I lied.’

You laugh. ‘Alright.’

‘Your turn.’

‘Last one for now.’ You narrow your gaze at him now, equal parts serious and playful. ‘I will kiss you whenever the fuck I please.’

He leans back, a theatrical hand over his chest. ‘Kim!’

‘I’m serious.’

‘I mean, sure, whenever you want. Wow, you really took that one hard, huh? Honestly, I was just worried my breath stank.’

You shrug. ‘It did. Still does.’

He covers his mouth and mutters an apology.

‘It also doesn’t bother me.’

The Taube shudders through gears as you press some acceleration. Finally, you’re flying again. ‘This is what will happen now: we’re going to pack up, find this hotel, get settled, feed ourselves, go over our notes. Then: you are going to shower, brush your teeth–with mouthwash, too. And then I am going to kiss you. And whatever else I feel like doing with you for the rest of the night. I haven’t decided yet.’

And now he is speechless.

You raise a brow.

Then he fucking giggles. ‘Well, that sounds like a date.’

The radio starts playing his silly Oranjese pop song. He cranks the volume up, and you don’t mind at all.

Chapter Text

Harry waits in the Taube while you head upstairs, jumping two steps at a time to get into your apartment. In your bathroom, you fumble bottles and tubes. Your hands are shaking again.

Get ahold of yourself. It’s not like you’ve never done this before. For crying out loud, you did this last night.

True, but you weren’t planning on it last night, it wasn’t premeditated.

It was preconceived.

Just focus.

You pack a duffel bag with the essentials: toothbrush and paste, razor and aftershave, anti-perspirant. You give yourself a quick spritz of cologne, and then immediately regret it. It’s showy, too much after a day in the field, and smells like it’s been in the bottle too long. Nothing to be done about it now.

You have to stretch up to the top shelf for what you really need: condoms and lubricant. A quick inspection of the condoms reveals they're expired. Hence the top shelf. It's been some time, you suppose. The last time was… no, best not think of it. You consider leaving them but you know there’s no guarantee Harry will have his own beyond that one soldier in his wallet yesterday, and you'd rather expired condoms than none at all. (You are definitely not going to stop at a Frittte just for sexual aids, not with the big simian at your side.) You pack a lot of them, just in case of… well, just in case. It feels obscene, packing this many, but again, you’d rather have and not need.

After that, you barely even think about clothes, just grab an armful of whatever's on top of the clean laundry basket, stuff them into your bag. Then you’re locking the door behind you and you’re out there again, the cold wind smacking you in the chest where your jacket hangs open. 

You hear loud pop music and you realise Harry has cranked the volume on the radio, grooving along yet again to that Oranjese thing the DJ will not stop pumping into the airwaves. You toss him your duffel bag as you clamber back into the driver’s seat.

‘You smell good,’ he says, and the effect that has is visceral. You wonder, if he’d said ‘nice’ instead of ‘good’, would you be half as hard as you are now?

You try to ignore the awareness of your own body as you follow Harry’s directions back to his place.

-

Harry’s home is the lesser half of a shabby duplex tucked down a cramped and decaying street in far North Jamrock. (You recall he moved after Martinaise; Jean begrudgingly helped him out of the festering pit he used to subsist–not live–in somewhere between Main street and Perdition. You would have helped him if your transfer had been pushed through sooner, but then again you don’t know if witnessing the cesspool of Former Harry’s life might have been too confronting.) His house is somehow smaller than your apartment.

The first thing you notice is the crumbling doorstep itself, or rather what he's left beside it: a small ceramic dish with what appears to be the leftovers of some chicken giblets and gravy, and a water bowl beside that.

‘You have a cat?’ you say, unable to keep a mild disappointment from your voice.

Really? You're sore that he's never mentioned it? You've slept with this man once and you think you deserve to know the minutiae of his entire life?

Yes. You do, actually.

‘Not mine,’ Harry says as he fishes his keys. ‘He's a local stray, I think. I keep trying to coax him inside, but he's an independent sort. He lets me pet him when he comes for a feed.’

‘Does this cat have a name?’

‘Kim,’ he says reluctantly.

‘Yes?’

‘No, I call the cat Kim. He, uh, has an orange coat, you see.’

Ah, no wonder he never mentioned it. The precinct at large would roast him alive, and he’s putting faith in you not to do the same. He flushes a deep red that makes you want to put your cold hands on his cheeks.

‘I think I have a toothache,’ you say, and he looks at you with such concern that you know your sarcasm has flown so high over his head that it may as well have entered low orbit. ‘That’s very sweet, Harry,’ you clarify.

‘Sorry. I'm nervous.’

‘I can tell. Given that we are still standing on your doorstep in the cold, talking about a pussy cat.’

‘Right.’

He unlocks the door and lets you inside. You're at once transported to his Inland Empire. The house smells of nicotine staining and vanilla candles, smells lived-in. You hear muffled voices over static and you realise he has left the radio on in the kitchen. He doesn’t immediately turn it off either, which tells you that he leaves it on deliberately to come home to the sound of other humans. (You’ve done the same in the past, when certain cases really taxed you and you didn’t have a partner to share the mental load with. You survive well enough alone; it seems Harry does less so.)

Every surface is adorned with things . You move through the short entryway and take in the frames crowding the walls: baroque art, landscape photography, entomology specimens, shadow boxes filled with trinkets, pebbles and seaglass, no real theme or genre to any of it, just anything that seems to have urged his bird brain to collect. You decide your favourite piece is an amateur’s oil painting of a weary clown smoking a half-finished cigarette.

You pass by the door to the kitchen and poke your head in (can't help yourself), and notice a lit fish tank on the bench (clean) beside the humming refrigerator. In it, a fat little shubunkin mouths busily at his pebble substrate. Another pet he hasn't told you about?

Seriously? You're threatened by a fish?

He's demonstrating his ability to care for another living being beside himself, a responsibility managed. Something to be commended.

It's just a fucking fish. Other cops have children and still manage.

‘Does the fish also have a name?’ you ask.

Harry shrugs. ‘Little Harry.’

You find yourself cringing even before you ask. ‘That thing about goldfish and memory?’

He snorts. ‘I thought it was funny.’

You shake your head to hide the fact you are smiling. It is a little bit funny.

Over his shoulder, you can see the living room, and you slip past him to have a gander. Paisley wallpaper peeling at the corners, smoke-yellowed drapes, sunken furniture that remembers the shape of his ass better than you do. No television, but a stereo lords over the space. In the centre of the room, a green shag rug and its flattened tassels belie the many hours of foot-scooting and booty-shaking it has endured. You can almost reconstruct the scene in your mind-:

Harry was mid-chore but the tape was calling to him, summoned him like a siren from the depths of laundry or dishes or whatever banal task was keeping him from fulfilling his true purpose: to tear it up. He twisted the volume skyward and cut that rug like his legs were scissors. Just him, alone, in his own little church, the dance confessional between the couch and coffee table. Sacred ground.

Harry waves at you. ‘Kim?’

‘I’m sorry, I was miles away.’

No, you were right here, so completely present that you saw the past.

‘If it’s all the same to you, I’m gonna shower.’ You realise he’s shivering, and feel sorry to have kept him waiting. There’s a thread that pulls at you, wants to follow him, but now is not the time. ‘Make yourself at home,’ he says, and disappears.

-

You’re in his bedroom. Couldn’t help yourself yet again, could you? 

Well, he did tell you to make yourself at home. Despite living alone, Harry's room feels anything but lonely, and you suspect this is a concerted effort on his part to make his space one that he wants to exist in. An environment that promotes his existence, revels in him and the care that he takes to maintain it. You’re Jamrock Shuffling through it all, bedside, shelves, wardrobe.

On his nightstand, beside dirty teacups, there are enough empty blister packs of paracetamol to suggest daily usage. Those, and a prescription pill bottle with the brand name Haemangiol: propranolol 20 mg . Take one capsule as needed when under duress. Perfectly legal drug use, nothing to be alarmed about. You know at least three other cops, including Jean Vicquemare, using the same prescription. (You realise too late that you're looking for signs of relapse–not because his failure would disappoint you, but because you know you would feel responsible for it, despite earlier agreements. Regardless, you find no evidence, and breathe easy.)

You pull open the nightstand drawer and find exactly what should not surprise you, but still does: a dirty magazine. It’s garden variety hetero-sexual porn, male-gaze, all tits and ass and pussy, but you notice he has dog-eared the pages that feature men as well as women. Especially if dick is involved. A centerfold sticks to itself like it’s been glued, and it takes you a moment to realise why. Nasty dog. You smirk and put it back.

The bookshelves over his bed (currently occupied by a stuffed bear) form a cozy little nook, a burrow for him to curl up in at night with a cup of Graadian Caravan and a Dick Mullen. You see your copy of Ghost Racer on top of a pile of bookmarked novels. There’s also a substantial catalogue of non-fiction, especially history, especially modern history, especially memoirs, and you get a sense of him trying to recover what he can from others’ memories if not his own. It pricks you a little with sadness, and you shuffle on.

His wardrobe is utterly clogged, falling out of itself. Clearly he owns more clothing than he can fit in the damn thing and the laundry basket just has to catch the spillover. You browse through the hangers, enjoying the smell of him in it all, fabric softener, musk again, and a faint but eternal body odour that the laundry detergent just can’t seem to budge. You pull out a denim jacket that looks to be at least two sizes too small for him, though it has halogen watermarks on it that match his green blazer. You get bold and try it on. It fits almost perfectly, if a little long in the arms, but you can roll the cuffs up. There’s a mirror on the wardrobe door; when you push it closed to check yourself out, you see him reflected. Standing on the bathroom threshold, fresh from the shower, towel around his waist, freckles and kelp hair again for the second night in a row.

‘I don't believe it,’ he says. ‘Kim, are you… Jamrock Shuffling? In my house?’ He pretends to wipe away a tear.

‘I can Jamrock Shuffle my way out your front door, if you like,’ you threaten, emptily.

He nods at the jacket through the mirror. ‘Looks good.’

Finally, you turn around. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t– This was rude.’

He laughs and shakes his head. ‘I’m flattered.’ He glides past you to start packing a bag of his own. ‘Keep it, if you like. It’s too small for me. Actually, I was gonna offer it, but I wasn’t sure if you liked denim.’

Helplessly, you smile. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘Thank you works.’ He smirks at you and pinches the cuff where you’ve tucked it up to your elbow. ‘Kinda hot, actually.’

Absolutely pathetic, what a simple compliment does to your blood pressure. ‘Thank you,’ you murmur.

You watch him pull underwear and shirts out of his drawers, begin to dress, and it’s clear to you that nothing is happening in his bedroom tonight, if it ever will, but you’re already possessed with the thought. You excuse yourself to his bathroom, because sometimes draining it is the only way to force the damn thing to heel.

You try to distract yourself, look around.

On the sinktop there's an anti-perspirant stick, a clogged disposable razor that he hasn't gotten around to replacing yet and a half-empty bottle of aftershave that smells of cedarwood, like every other men’s cologne you've ever breathed. A thin film of moisture covers everything, smears of it where he has wiped steam from the mirror. You see a perfectly placed handprint on the glass, and you get a vision of him gazing at himself and resolutely unable to stand the truth reflected back at him so he just covers himself up.

It’s the sadness that kills it. You flush, and stuff yourself back into your pants.

Harry waits for you in the living room, wearing Judit’s handmade beanie and scarf to combat the cold. He’s paired them with a black woollen pullover. That, and pale denim jeans that match your new jacket, and you almost feel bad depriving him of it. Almost.

‘Ready?’ (He has an armful of towels for the soggy passenger seat.)

He turns the radio off, feeds Little Harry a slow release pellet and leaves a fresh bowl of biscuits for his pussy cat. Then you get on the motorway eastbound once more, unsure when you’ll be this side of the river again. When you hit cruising speed across the bridge, you let one of the levers go to run your hand over his thigh. Tight jeans and pop music.

-

‘Nice cock,’ Harry says, looking up at the chicken on the sign declaring La Belle Poule . Calling it a hotel was rather generous of Granger, but even a glorified motor inn this side of the river feels like a resort compared to Jamrock. You rarely have reason to visit Revachol East, and you’ve forgotten how much lighter everything feels across the long irradiated brown. Fewer aerostatics, less light pollution, less air pollution, higher altitude, a grander sense of space here. The sky feels higher somehow, not crowding and low like the omnipresent cloud blanket over the west. It feels lonely almost. You like it.

‘I said nice cock,’ Harry prods you.

‘That’s a hen,’ you correct him.

‘How can you tell?’

‘I know cock,’ you say blandly.

Harry’s cheeks fill with air as he tries not to laugh. ‘Wow. So what are you like, some kind of cock expert? That means you could teach me, right?’

‘Oh, I think you know more than you recall.’

‘Reckon you could jog my memory, take a look at some gaps that need… filling?’

You roll your eyes. ‘I’m filling my stomach first.’

Neither of you have eaten since Marlene’s, and one physiological urge surpasses another. You park the Taube in the bay outside yours and Harry's room, #7, and backtrack along the sidewalk to a little 24-hour diner you were grateful to have passed on the way in. It's well after ten-thirty now and the acne-plagued server at the counter looks extremely put upon to have patrons at this time of night. The attitude reminds you a little of Garte.

The world's tiniest mug of black coffee and a toasted turkey cranberry sandwich later and you're able to focus some on your notes.

‘Hey, we haven't given this case a title yet,’ Harry remarks through a mouthful of cheese and tomato.

You consider. ‘The case of the Captain's Missing Son?’

He frowns. ‘Implying Walther Durand is involved, yet again.’

This is still a sticking point for him. Best to leave it alone.

‘The Durand Family Murders,’ you suggest. Plain and simple.

‘Perfect.’ He writes it in his ledger. THE DURAND FAMILY MURDERS. Taking possession of it.

After that, reviewing with him feels easier, like a crease has smoothed. Soon, Harry is yawning widely and you know there's only so much time left before you start dipping into tomorrow’s reserves tonight. But hell, you’ve been doing that your entire career, and so has he. What’s another late one?

You tip the server way more than he deserves on your way out, considering he’ll likely have to put up with you both for a few more days at least.

-

Maybe it's the drizzle, maybe it's Revachol East where the electricity is more reliable, but the streetlights seem that much brighter here. Even through the thick plastic blinds in #7, the light spills into the room like high tide over a seawall. You have to remind yourself that no one can see into the room from outside. No one can see you and Harry sharing the short narrow bathroom, toothbrushing in tandem. No one can see the moment of awkward, heightened anticipation when you're finished, and so he is, and you're both standing there on the tiles staring at each other through the mirror, the hum of the fluorescent light so loud it feels like the room is alive.

You turn to face him. ‘I’m going to kiss you now,’ you tell him.

‘Okay.’

‘Cool?’

‘Very cool.’

You're really good at this. Ask him to play cards or Suzerainty, why don’t you.

He just waits and gazes at you, biting the inside of his mouth, his eyes full of expectation.

You sigh at yourself. ‘Look, if you're expecting some kind of expert, flawless seduction, you're asking the wrong man. I'm not adept at any of that. I don't think I'm very good at the follow up, either.’

‘I dunno,’ he says thoughtfully, ‘if last night was any indication of your skill at “following up”, then I think you're pretty damn good.’ You can see his nipples are hard through his shirt. ‘But, hell, I would be happy with just a kiss.’

There he goes, disarming you again. Wholesome bastard. You let yourself smile. You step towards him, your heart rate surging with every inch closer until you can feel your own blood pulsing in your ears. You put your hands on his shoulders and rise up onto the balls of your feet to kiss him. His lips are chapped but soft, and very plush. He mouths sweetly back at you and his moustache tickles. His arms come up to hold you, hugged around your waist, steadying you there. It feels awkward, yes, but intimate.

One pure little kiss, and you break it just to see his reaction. His eyes are glazed, heavy-lidded, lower lip hanging slightly open as he waits for you. One kiss turns into another, and a third, each one a little more experimental than the last, until your hands are on his neck and you're pushing into his mouth, demanding his tongue. He lets you.

Whatever it is, he lets you. He lets you back him up against the sink to really take a grip of his hips, pressing yourself against him as you kiss him with abandon. He lets you bite his lips, keening softly into your mouth. He lets you untuck his shirt from his jeans, soft threadbare cotton, and slip your bare hands underneath, palms flush around his chubby waist. He shudders as you dig your fingertips into the valleys of his ribs. Your hands are frigid, and he’s so warm.

He allows himself to be led to the bed, and you sit him down on the bleached white sheets so you can stand over him, kiss him again with your hands cupped around his upturned cheeks. You feel his hands on your hips, flicking your belt buckle and fly open so he can slide his hand into your pants, getting a handful of you through your briefs. You gasp against his teeth and he chuckles at that, the sound like lazy thunder in his throat, smiling into your lips.

‘I’m flattered,’ he murmurs, his breath falling against your tongue.

You lean back to push him, a hand flat in his chest urging him to lay down. He does, willingly, and you climb atop him, straddle him. He looks up at you with a kind of restless anxiety, his hands alighting on your thighs like he's unsure where to put them now. You sit on him heavily, put your weight on his hips. You grind yourself down on him, and feel… nothing. Either that denim is too tight or–you glance down. His hands are still massaging your inner thighs, attentive, but his cock remains uninterested within his jeans.

‘Harry?’

He just sighs.

‘Is everything alright?’

‘Sorry, Kim.’

You hover, unsure if you should stay the course or get off of him. ‘Is this what you meant by “rubbish at intimacy”?’

‘No.’ He sighs again, deeper, defeated. ‘Turns out I’m bad at this, too.’

‘Am I doing something wrong?’

‘No!’ One of his hands shoots up to your waist to keep you where you are. ‘No, I promise, you’re perfect. And a great kisser, by the way. I just–It’s just been a while since I’ve… you know…’

‘Fucked sober?’

He nods.

Ah. You had given this some thought, that it might become an issue. Sobriety is a vicious awareness of existence, and of oneself most of all. ‘Last night,’ you try to argue.

‘Was a crime of passion. I wasn’t expecting it, and that was its own kind of high. Look, I’ll be completely honest, I actually can’t remember the last time I had sex, sober or otherwise.’

The booze, you considered, but you don’t know why this never occurred to you. He can remember streets he has never walked, he can recall the scientific names for obscure Samaran marsupials, he can describe constellations and weather formations, but why you expected him to recall a simple detail about his life, like his last fuck, is beyond understanding. Probably because you expected he would have been fucking (someone, anyone) since Martinaise, “sober or otherwise”. It seems he was neither drinking nor fucking.

‘I… I’m sorry, Harry, I wasn’t thinking–’

‘Kim, stop. You’ve done nothing wrong, okay? It’s me. Whatever it is, it’s me, and a laundry list of me at that. Maybe it’s being sober? Maybe I’m tired? Maybe I’m too self-conscious? Maybe it was the expectation? Thinking about it too much all day.’

This, at least, buoys you a little. ‘All day?’

He nods bashfully. ‘Look, unhealthy circumstances aside, last night was nice, okay? And you know me, I ruin nice things.’

Finally, you try to clamber off him, but he sits up, catches you by the wrist.

‘But that doesn’t mean you can’t have something nice.’ His meaning escapes you, but your confusion only seems to incite him.

He grins and grabs you by the hips, rolling you onto your back amid the pillows like you're no more than a ragdoll to him. The force of it, that goddamn manhandling he does, it makes you so fiercely aware of how little you are compared to him, makes you so goddamn hard. He shucks your pants and briefs off to free you. For the longest moment, he just admires your cock, greed in his face.

You can’t help but follow his gaze down at yourself, as if to see yourself through his eyes. You are, well, proportionate to the rest of your body, maybe a little shorter and narrower than you would like, but this doesn’t seem to bother him. If anything, he appreciates you all the more as he takes hold: you fit so nicely in his palm, a perfect handful for him, only the very tip of you peeking out above his wrist as he wraps warm spit-wet fingers around your shaft. A sigh escapes you as he gently pulls back your skin.

‘You don't have to–’

He puts his mouth over yours, kisses the words back down your throat and you get the message on his tongue: don’t argue. So you don’t. When he senses you settle, he leans back to watch himself handle you.

It’s leisurely, the way he plays with you, all slow and adoring like he’s going to take his time, no goal, you’re here to be enjoyed by him as much as he is here to please you. You submit to it, sucking on your own lip when he presses his thumb the right way or angles his wrist just so. His free hand slides up under your shirt to palm over your belly and you realise that you still have his denim jacket on. You move to shrug it off and Harry shakes his head at you.

‘Leave it on,’ he says. ‘Kinda doing it for me.’

You relax for him, and he pushes your shirt up high until it bunches in your armpits, exposing your chest for himself. One hand firmly massaging your cock, the other exploring your body. He meanders over your abdomen, sternum, pectorals; his touch reminds you how little definition there is for him to find, but you can feel it in the way he strokes you that he’s not looking for anything, he’s just feeling you, mapping you. His hand comes to rest over your ribcage, fingers gripped around you and a thumb playing across your nipple like you’re a toy for his enjoyment. It’s one of the most arousing things you’ve ever felt, more than his hand on your cock right now, more than being inside him last night, just his obsession with you, your body.

You want to tell him it feels good, all of it, and he’s good at it, at the making you feel good, but the words get lost on the path from your brain to your tongue and you find yourself covering your mouth, stifling one obscene noise after another. That, it seems, enrages him.

The more you try to quiet yourself, the more his handling grows less leisurely and more calculated: long, tight ingresses up and down your shaft, deliberate thumbing across your tip. His free hand moves down your chest, traces over your belly until it comes to rest just above your pubic bone, and there he presses the heel of his palm into your gut. The pressure is both heavenly and devastating, in a way that makes you wish you could feel it from inside.

‘Fuck,’ you hiss through your fingers.

‘Come, if you want to,’ Harry says. Not a command, just an invitation. Like he’s indifferent, like his purpose here is merely to hold you in his hands and adore you, whether you come or not, that being incidental. So indifferent, so incidental, that it catalyses you.

You shudder as your body climaxes without your consent. Harry leads you through it, pumping you as you throb in his hand, putting that blessed pressure into your belly again. It’s not the hardest you have ever come, but the height of it lasts long enough that you forget where you are for a moment, you forget everything except that Harry is here with you, has you in his reverent hands like you’re something precious to him.

You breathe shiveringly through the last little pulses of it and feel him slowly ease back and release you. Your skin feels cold the moment his touch leaves you. The mattress bounces as he flops down into the pillows beside you. When finally you open your eyes, you’re greeted with the sight of him grinning at you, oozing self-satisfaction.

Harry nods down at your quivering body. ‘That’s a look,’ he says. You look down. Pearls of cum striped across your belly below the white shirt scrunched up over your nipples, all framed by the wings of a denim jacket that belonged to him less than two hours ago. ‘Hot.’

Just out of curiosity, you glance down at his jeans. Maybe they look a little tighter, but maybe it’s just the lighting.

‘It’s okay, Kim,’ he says, following your thoughts. ‘I’m on the bench tonight.’

You briefly consider the possibility you may need to be more… performative in your noise-making. You’re so used to keeping it to yourself, remaining quiet. You roll onto your side to face him, lay a hand on his hip. ‘But it doesn’t seem fair. I feel I should return the favour.’

He breathes a little huff, not quite a laugh. ‘It wasn’t a favour, and doesn’t need returning.’ Then he pulls you into his arms. It’s simple, and so intimate that it silences you. You rest your head against his chest, close your eyes.

-

You stir when he’s rolling you over, taking your glasses and remaining clothes off for you, towelling your tacky cum off of your skin, pulling you under the bedcovers. Your awareness crystallises when you see him undressing. Blurry slats of light across his back where the streetlights fall through the blinds. You sit up when you see him pull out the sofa bed.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Making it look convincing,’ he chuckles.

You lay back, embarrassed at your own relief as he finally crawls into the bed beside you. But you’re awake now, and aware. Aware of the fact you’re sharing a bed with him, yet again. Aware of his warmth, like a furnace. It draws you in, and you shift closer, daring to slide an arm across his chest, as though you weren’t tucked in against him only moments ago.

‘No need to be coy, Kim, just get in here.’

He tugs you in flush against his side, his arm about your shoulders. It’s soft, it’s nice, and yet you fidget. You struggle for so long to find a position that doesn’t feel strange and awkward, until eventually you realise that you’re not going to find it again, not tonight. It’s been years since you last slept skin to skin against another human. Your limbs don’t remember how that feels, how to find the peace in nudity.

Harry knows. He lets you shift, doesn’t restrain you, even when you get up to have your one cigarette through the bathroom window, unable to sleep without it. He’s still awake, barely, when you come back, waiting for you, and you know he’ll wait all night, he’ll wait long hours, weeks, years even, until he can get comfortable with you, and you can get comfortable with him.

-

Small morning sounds. A kettle boiling, toilet flushing, a cough clearing a phlegmy throat, metal spoon clinking ceramic, blinds lifting. Cold light from a cloudy sky. You roll over and put your glasses on. The bedside clock says it’s 7:04am, and you’re appalled at yourself.

Harry slides a chipped hotel mug filled with cheap hotel coffee onto the nightstand beside you. He sits silently on the bed next to you and sips his own. He’s not yet dressed, but his outfit for the day waits on the sofa: bootcut pants and a corduroy jacket, patrol cloak hanging on the coathook by the door. He's expecting rain again. There’s no hurry about him, content just to enjoy these naked minutes with you before you both have to clothe and sweep yourselves out the door and into the world where murders happen and whole families are annihilated.

You want to delay it just a little longer. It was over too quickly last night, too little, too awkward, too tired, too much of not enough. It was nice, but you want more than nice.

‘Take a shower with me?’ you ask.

He searches your face for meaning, for what you really want.

‘Just a shower,’ you say.

-

There’s nothing sexual about it, but it is a little taste of the intimacy you craved. The shower is small, barely big enough for one man let alone two. But you make do together, sharing the cheap hotel soap and shampoo, skin on skin contact both alarming and comforting at once. It’s an exercise in getting comfortable with each other, both nude, both vulnerable.

It doesn’t take you long to start shedding self-consciousness and start taking pleasure in it. You enjoy the way the soap suds cling to his chest hair, the sodden mop on his head obscuring his eyes. You put your hands on him, trace his thick belly, wash his back for him, and he does the same for you, and of course his hands wander just so, stroking down over your waist, your hips, your thighs, your ass. His wet beard drips water over your shoulder as he leans in to kiss the bridge of your neck.

‘Is this it?’ he asks, just a whisper against your skin through the hot rain. ‘What you want?’

‘Yes,’ you breathe, and turn your head to kiss him.

It’s over too quickly, the cold air pouncing on you when you have to shut the hot water off. But he kisses you again in the steam, a hand on your cheek, and it’s a silent promise, you can have this again, you can have more. The knowledge of that is enough to quell you as you dry off, collect yourself and put on all the skin and mask of Lieutenant Kitsuragi for the day. You save the rest for later.

You both grab a cold, meagre breakfast of sandwiches from the diner round the corner–conveniently called The Corner Diner–and Harry buys himself a lemon tart from the cabinet, also to save for later.

-

You start with a few check-ins. In the Taube, you radio to the 41st, follow up on the grunts’ progress. One of the juniors–JO Martin–has struck what she thinks is gold, but you know is only pyrite.

‘I found central medical records for an Amelie Durand!’ Martin says. ‘Durand was receiving an undisclosed treatment over the course of seven years from ‘43 to ‘50, from a practice called Revachol Reassignment Clinic.’ It’s clear from the tone of her voice she has no clue what a clinic by that name would specialise in.

‘Good work, Officer Martin,’ you tell her, trying your absolute best to sound encouraging and not at all disappointed. Central medical records are only extant for Moralintern censuses. There will be no address and no contact details for the patient, not even a record of the nature of the treatment itself (though you don’t really have to guess at that), only records of funds changing hands. In cases where there is money to be followed, a paper trail like this is a valuable lead. In this case? Well, it’s better than nothing.

‘Officer Martin,’ Harry chimes in, ‘do you have a phone number for Revachol Reassignment Clinic?’

‘Yes!’ She sounds delighted that he asked, and hands you back to Jules.

‘Connecting you now, officers,’ he says.

There’s static, and then more static, and finally a feminine customer service voice picks up the line.

‘Revachol Reassignment Clinic. You’re speaking with Antoinette, how may I help you?’

‘Good morning, madam.’ You introduce yourself, rank included; there’s no response when you mention the RCM. ‘I’m calling in regards to a former patient of the clinic, surname Durand. We’re currently trying to locate the whereabouts of this person, and we were hoping you might have contact details on file. An address or phone number, perhaps.’

‘One moment please,’ says Antoinette. A series of shuffles and muffled murmurs. You and Harry share a glance via the rearview mirror. Antoinette returns. ‘Officer Kitsuragi, was it?’ 

‘Yes.’

‘I’m sorry, Officer,’ she says, and her voice turns to a rehearsed quality, like she’s reading from a prompt card. ‘Here at Revachol Reassignment Clinic, our staff respect the rights and privacies of our patients and clients. We cannot divulge private or sensitive information without a written warrant issued by…’ and you know exactly how that goes. It could take weeks to get a warrant, if you get one.

‘Understood, Antoinette. Thank you for your time.’ You sigh as the line clicks off.

‘Waste of fucking time,’ Harry mutters.

‘Ten-two,’ says Jules, sarcasm as dry as ground pepper. ‘Anything else I can do to help you waste time, officers?’

‘Thank you, Jules, that will be all.’

‘Ten-four, over and out.’

You and Harry look at each other, at a loss.

‘Something will come up,’ he says, with absolute certainty.

As if in response, the radio hisses at you, and it’s Granger on the line, calling you in to the precinct.

‘We have Walther Durand,’ she says. ‘Bianco is bringing him in as we speak.’

Something flashes across Harry’s face but he remains quiet. Granger explains that Walther showed up to the Durand home only minutes ago, a friend with him. There was a scene, but he consented to being brought to the station for questioning.

‘I want Du Bois in that interview room,’ she says, and you don’t miss the pause before she says, ‘and you, Kitsuragi, natürlich.’ You understand, of course, Harry is the word wizard, and it doesn’t wound you to admit it.

‘Thank you, Captain. We’ll be there shortly.’

‘Told you something would come up,’ Harry says.

-

When you arrive at the 37th, you do a doubletake at a shiny Saber Hirondelle parked outside the front entrance in a rare patch of sunlight. Blinding chrome, navy blue and orange. You can’t park the Taube quick enough, desperate to get out and get a closer look at this thing.

‘Wow.’

Harry follows your gaze. ‘That’s the Saber, right?’

‘Brand new,’ you say.

You glide past the beast, slowing but not stopping, as though lingering might wake it, just to take it in. It rides low, streamlined and aerodynamic, sharp angles that become smooth curves, like it was sculpted by a blast of desert sand. The engine is front-mounted, a long snout on it that looks like a beak, and wheel guards that flare up into little wing tips. Just like a swallow.

‘What’s it doing here?’ Harry wonders aloud. ‘No one on RCM payroll could afford this beauty.’

You shrug, feigning indifference, and hurry yourself up the steps before your salivating can turn to drooling.

Inside the front doors, a scene is unfolding: a man is arguing with the officers at the front desk while a small group of juniors and patrol officers loiter off to the side, whispering back and forth between themselves, watching the man but not intervening. Among them, SO Cartier catches your eye.

‘Granger’s waiting upstairs,’ she says. ‘Interview room five.’

You can hardly hear her over the stream of vitriol.

‘This is unlawful! You can’t just detain him without evidence–’

‘Sir,’ one of the desk grunts tries peacefully, ‘Mister Durand consented to an interview. We are not detaining–’

‘He should not be up there alone!’

As you and Harry slide past the front desk, you catch a glimpse of the man arguing, presumably, on Walther Durand’s behalf. You’ve never met this man, but you recognise him. Seolite, late-twenties, well-dressed in black leather, long hair pulled back in a ponytail, a signature mole on his left cheek. This man was on the cover of last month’s MC Monthly, and another several months before that. He doesn’t even clock you.

You throw one last glance over your shoulder, another doubletake, just to be sure, and yes it’s still him. You could approach. You could speak to him. You could ask him to autograph a page in your notebook. Stupid. It wouldn’t be proper, not here, not now, not ever.

Harry, ever perceptive, elbows you in the stairwell. ‘What was that about?’

‘That was Hideki Knight,’ you murmur.

You can see Harry turn the rotating cards of his internal encyclopedia through his mind before he comes up blank. ‘Who?’

‘Hideki Knight. He is one of the foremost current TipTop racers, and the only Seolite man to compete on the interisolary circuit. He has never won, but he has placed top five in every single race he has ever competed in, and frequently takes bronze or silver.’

‘Oooh, that guy! I think I was reading about him in your MC Monthly.’

You nod.

‘That Saber outside must be his,’ Harry guesses.

‘More than likely. Seems he is here on Durand’s behalf?’

‘I guess we’ll find out.’

Interview room five is easy enough to find, what with Granger standing outside the door, chain-smoking and chewing her nails. She looks wholly relieved to see you both.

‘Thank you for coming in, detectives.’ Her voice is stuffy, her eyes red, like she’s been crying.

‘But of course,’ Harry says. ‘I can’t imagine how hard this must be for you.’

She nods. ‘I haven’t seen him in years, but he looks just like Abraham.’

Something about the way she uses his given name. There’s an intimacy in it. She couldn’t do this interview. Even if she didn’t know Walther, even if she weren’t connected, she couldn’t do any of this. And that’s when it occurs to you: she was close with Abraham Durand, or at least she wanted to be. She saw him every day, after all. Impossible, not to feel something toward one’s partner, regardless of their life, their choices, their family.

As usual, you are one step behind Harry, who has clearly already made this connection, possibly even the night you both met Granger. He pulls her into a hug, and you watch the flash of shock in her face slowly fade to relief again.

‘Thank you,’ she says, and hands Harry the key.

-

Walther Durand does indeed look like his father, and in that way, looks like a younger version of Harry. Wild brown hair, spectacles resting on high cheekbones, a moustache that looks like it has only recently filled out, a sense of fashion that signals… well, a signal. He seems alert yet anxious when you and Harry enter the room; one of his hands clutches the other, self-soothing. Harry does that thing where he can shift a person’s mood just enough with only a few well-arranged words (‘I am Detective Du Bois, but you can call me Harry.’) and a smile that says: you are not in danger.

‘Can I get you anything to drink, Mister Durand? Coffee, tea? Do you smoke?’

Walther shakes his head. ‘You can call me Walther.’

You introduce yourself and take a seat opposite Walther; Harry takes the seat at the end of the table, perfectly adjacent between you both. Clever. You do all the preliminary talk, all the RCM jargon, Walther’s wayfarer rights etc, the nature of the interview. You take out your notebook and turn to a new page, and whatever softening Harry has managed to do is instantly undone. Walther’s lip begins to tremble.

‘To start,’ you say with affected calm, ‘can you tell us your whereabouts on the night of–’

‘Wait,’ Walther says. ‘You think I did this?’

You look at Harry, but he won’t look at you, and he definitely won’t say what he doesn’t believe. He says nothing.

‘I don’t even know what happened!’ Walther declares. ‘My whole family is gone, and no one will tell me what happened!’

Harry looks at you now, something reproachful in his gaze, as if he’s urging you to see what he sees. Still, he says nothing, and leaves the duty of care to you.

You take a breath. ‘It’s our responsibility to–’

‘I know your responsibilities!’ Walther says. ‘My pa worked here his whole life!’

Harry turns back to him. ‘You must miss him.’

‘Miss him?’ Walther says incredulously. ‘An hour ago, I didn’t even know he was dead !’

The young man puts his face in his hands. He breathes shudderingly. ‘I’m sorry,’ he manages to push out between gulps of air. ‘You’re just… doing your job. I understand.’

This is going wrong already. You have to take control of the situation before it devolves. ‘No one is saying you are responsible for Abraham’s death, Walther,’ you say slowly.

‘Not to my face.’ It sounds like a defense, but it’s said with such weariness, such resignation, that you know it isn’t. This is a man who is used to things not being said to his face.

‘Detective Du Bois– Harry and I will be happy to explain everything to you, but I think it would be prudent first to clear you from our list of suspects. Simply to get it out of the way.’

‘List? You mean you have some idea who did this?’

You look to Harry again, silently begging. He’s always been better with people, especially emotional people. Hell, he’s better with emotions, too. Finally, he comes to your aid.

Harry leans in toward Walther, puts his arms on the table uncrossed. His face is passive, kindly, and for a moment you see him in another life, sitting down at a family dinner table, having a heart-to-heart with his child. The moment passes, and you shiver.

‘I’m sorry to say at this time, that list isn’t very long,’ Harry admits, ‘and you were at the top of it. Were . Seeing you here now, Walther, I’m ready to strike your name off it. All we need from you is an alibi.’ He beckons you for your notes, and reads out the timeline, the dates and hours that Walther needs to account for in order to clear his name. ‘Can you tell us your whereabouts, your activities over those three nights? Anyone who can vouch for you?’

Walther clears his throat. ‘Well, that Friday night I was at the track,’ he says without hesitation. ‘And I was home with my partner all weekend. We live in Le Jardin.’

‘The track?’ you ask.

‘Revachol proving grounds,’ he says. ‘For Zéro Carrousel.’

‘So you, what, work the circuit?’ you guess.

‘No. Well, I used to. Not anymore. My partner competes in TipTop. He’s waiting downstairs, he can vouch for me–’

‘Wait,’ you murmur. ‘I saw– your partner is Hideki Knight?’

Walther flushes a little. ‘You know him?’

Your ears go as pink as his cheeks. ‘I… have followed his career some.’

This makes Walther smile for the first time since you walked in, and it reminds you of the photograph Harry found in Durand’s desk.

‘Just out of curiosity,’ Harry says, sparing you a moment of embarrassing silence, ‘where did you two meet?’

‘We met at the last Zéro Carrousel,’ Walther says. There’s fondness in his voice, and a relief, as though he’s pleased to be thinking about something else, anything else but the real reason he’s here. ‘Almost four years ago. I got pa and me tickets to the race. We got there early so I could get an autograph from Hideki. He… He said I was cute, gave me his phone number on the spot, just like that. And… Well, here we are.’ The smile dissipates as his own words seem to recall him to where he is, in a windowless room in a grieving precinct of the RCM, trying to clear his name of the murder of his ‘pa’.

It seems so absurd when you zoom out from it all, and you wonder if this is how Harry sees the world, sees cases, sees people, with this unique ability to zoom out and in at will, to see the grand shape of it all as well as every detail all at once. Forests and trees.

Walther’s eyes swim, but he doesn’t cry. ‘He was my best friend.’

Harry rifles through his ledger for a time before extracting a little square of paper: the photograph. It’s definitely against protocol, giving evidence to a suspect, but he clearly doesn’t give a damn, and in this moment neither do you. You don’t try to stop him as he hands the photograph to Walther.

Walther looks at the image of himself, and finally tears begin to spill over his lashes, fogging his glasses. ‘Pa took this. I don’t like having my picture taken, but…’

‘But you were so happy,’ Harry says. ‘You just met the love of your life and you were spending the day with your best friend.’

He nods.

‘I’m so sorry, Walther.’

-

Naturally, Knight vouches for Walther. Quite vocally, when he is finally allowed to be present. Harry takes the brunt of his abuse (directed at any RCM officer within his radius), with admirable grace. Only you would know Harry is hiding a smile as Knight yells at him, one hand jabbing a finger in his face and the other fiercely clutched around Walther’s.

There are at least five of Knight’s pit crew members a mere phone call away who also vouch for Walther, and it almost seems insulting to say Walther has a ‘rock solid alibi’. You accept what Harry already knew: there’s no way in hell this man could have been even remotely involved in the murders of his father, step-mother and brothers. He’s a victim as much as they are.

He covers his mouth when you tell him for how long they’ve been dead.

‘I tried to call on Sunday night,’ he says, a tide pulling at his voice, eroding him. ‘And again on Monday– and they were already–’ He turns and puts his face into Knight’s waiting chest. His cries are silent, but his shoulders shudder with each sob. Knight is equally quiet, arms around him.

You’ve experienced this before. There’s little you can do here but be patient, wait for the crying to run its course. Until then, you just observe the pair. They’re young adults, a little more than half your age, but they look like boys to you. Knight is bigger, broader than Walther, a little more athletic than most racers, and you recall he’s been criticised by journalists for his size, his refusal to diet just to help his game. Walther looks almost waif-like in his arms, and at once you regret having thought it. You know how that feels, to be compared to the bigger, sturdier man at your side.

Harry produces a jug of water with glasses and fills one for everyone present. Knight ignores it; Walther takes his and drinks deeply.

‘We still need to ask you some questions if you feel up to it,’ Harry says.

Walther sits back from Knight, stable at least. He wipes his cheeks on his sleeve and takes his glasses off to clean them. ‘Where are they?’ he asks. ‘The bodies.’

You lean forward. ‘Your family are currently in the care of Revachol Eastern Morgue. They are being processed for evidence; treated with the utmost respect, I assure you.’

‘I want to see them.’

Harry glances at you briefly, then back to Walther. ‘I, uh, I’m not sure that’s a good idea, Walther.’

He shakes his head. ‘I don’t care. I have to see them. I need to. I’ll answer any questions you have, I’ll do anything I can to help, but I need to see them first.’

-

In the Taube’s rearview, you watch Knight open the passenger door of the Saber for Walther. When Knight hits the ignition, the Saber purrs to life and you almost feel embarrassed to lead this pristine creature along with a coughing old heap like the Taube. You pull away from the kerb and they follow you as you head for the morgue. Somehow, Harry knows the way. Just like he knows you’re spurning the Taube in your mind.

He pets the dashboard, dropping crumbs from his lemon tart. ‘Don’t mind Kim. You’re a classic, darling.’

‘How did you know?’ you ask.

‘You were frowning at the gear shift.’

‘Not about the MC. About Walther.’

‘What about him?’

‘You were right,’ you admit. ‘He’s innocent. There’s no doubt in my mind, he couldn't have done this. But you already knew that.’

‘Yeah,’ he says around a mouthful of lemon curd. ‘And?’

‘And nothing. How did you know?’

Harry shrugs. ‘It was a feeling. Feelings matter.’

You sigh. ‘I never resent it when you are right and I am wrong. But sometimes I resent the reason you are right.’

He pushes the remainder of the tart into his face and smiles into the distance. ‘No, you don’t.’

You roll your eyes at him. ‘Right again, I suppose.’

‘I know.’ He puts a gentle hand on your knee, and gives you a reassuring squeeze. ‘Turn right at the lights.’

Chapter Text

There are several other Verlässlich Taubewagens in the parking garage behind Revachol Eastern Morgue. Harry waves at them and says something to the Taube about bonding with the sisterhood before you head inside. The building resembles a bunker, all brutalist concrete, and you suspect that’s what it was likely used for during the war (though the bombs didn’t impact this side of the river quite so heavily.) You sign in at the front desk, let the clerk know your business, and Walther and Knight push through the doors shortly thereafter.

Knight keeps a respectable distance from Walther, but visibly orbits him. A casual onlooker would see no intimacy there, but you know better. It's in the way Knight threat-assesses anyone who dares even approach Walther, a readiness about him to spring into action. You see Knight’s nostrils flare as Harry flanks Walther, a ferocity there like he's sizing Harry up. Walther, on the other hand, seems only too glad to have an escort either side of him. He walks calmly ahead of his small entourage, led by an attendant through long teal fluorescent hallways until finally you come to a designated viewing room.

Inside, it’s frigid and smells of disinfectant and isopropyl alcohol. You feel Harry breathe deeply beside you.

There is a diener present, a younger looking gentleman, maybe a student, presiding over four sealed body bags all lined up on cold metal trolleys. The diener gives Walther all the necessary condolences in a way that sounds both sincere and yet inescapably rehearsed, and then presents a box of nitrile gloves.

Harry holds out a staying hand towards Walther as he reaches for the gloves. You see Knight shift infinitesimally closer.

‘You don't have to do this,’ Harry says. ‘They have all been identified by your father’s colleagues. You don't have to see them this way. Believe me when I say you will never forget it. Are you sure that's a memory you want to take with you for life?’

Walther nods his understanding. ‘It’s just something I have to do,’ he says.

Harry backs off. The diener unzips the first bag, and you're momentarily arrested by the sight of his exposed wrist, vivid colour tattoos peeking out between his sleeve and glove. You're distracted, and you don't see Abraham Durand’s dead face (What's to see? You've seen it.), you barely hear the little sob that escapes Walther. A flash of movement in your periphery and you know without seeing that he has retreated into Knight’s arms. Harry shuffles at your side like he wants to reach out, comfort the young man. You nudge his shoe with your boot, shake your head imperceptibly, and he retreats once more.

Three more bags, three more times Walther braces for the impact and every time the reveal steals a breath from him. But he survives. Tear-streaked, but standing. You've seen bigger, older, more virile men than him break down, throw up, lose it completely on seeing the distorted face of but a single loved one, let alone four.

If anything, Harry seems to be the one suffering. Especially seeing the boys again, Cédric and César, their eggshell cheeks. They don't look like they're sleeping. They look empty, robbed; they look like wasted potential, like cracked eggs inside a black nest. Harry swallows loudly in the silence, the kind of meaty swallow one does to hold back bile.

There's a beat when everyone present in the room looks to Walther, unspeaking, a silent question in the air–Satisfied?–and eventually he nods, and the diener zips up the bags.

-

Walther is summoned away to fill out paperwork and Harry, desperate to be out of this room, follows with Knight. You hang back a moment.

‘You have tattoos,’ you say to the diener, nodding down at the colour still peeking out from under his white coat sleeve.

‘You wanna see em?’ he asks.

‘If you don't mind.’

He shucks his gloves, washes his hands and rolls his sleeves up to expose his forearms. You don't know what you were expecting, but it definitely wasn't a collage of elegant, long-haired cats, calico, tabby, ginger.

‘They’re… lovely,’ you say, at a loss. ‘You must have some knowledge of tattooing, then?’

He smiles at your awkwardness. ‘I guess?’

‘What can you tell us about this woman's, if anything?’ You gesture to the appropriate body bag containing Céleste Durand. ‘The one on the inside of her wrist.’

‘Oh, the apple blossom? It's pretty, I s’pose.’

‘Does it have meaning?’

He shrugs. ‘I couldn't tell ya, I'm not a “meaningful” kinda guy. I can say for sure, whatever it means, it's a blastover.’

‘Blastover?’

‘A new tattoo, covering an old one.’

‘How can you tell?’ you ask.

He re-gloves, unzips the bag and adjusts her wrist to demonstrate, pointing to a little raised patch of skin. ‘See this scarring here? It's old. You'd have to know what to look for, but it's there.’

When he points it out, you have to squint, but you can see it. Tucked away in the corner of a leaf: a little star, barely a centimetre in width, and he's right, you'd never find it if you weren't looking for it. It's possible that Harry found it during the field autopsy and simply didn't say anything, just as he has done on previous cases when something seems so obvious to him that he wouldn't deem it worth mentioning.

You're reminded of something Alain said back in the Whirling: scars make the best tattoos, they say. It seems the opposite can also be true, that tattoos make the best scars.

A star, on the inside of her wrist. This circle of the underground is not for you, but you know what it means. It means this woman was your half-sister, at least once upon a time, before she chose blood family over found family. Or perhaps it's merely a coincidence, a foolish teenage mistake she wanted undone. Regardless, it's something. Maybe not a lead, but it has the scent about it.

‘How old would you say the underlying tattoo is?’ you ask.

The diener shrugs. ‘You’d have to ask a tattooist, man. I'm just a client, it's all witchcraft with needles to me. You should probably wait for the coroner’s report, officer.’

You ask him where he gets his work done and he gives you the name and address of a studio on Boogie Street: Electric Boogie Tattoo. He tells you to ask for Erika, his artist, in the likely event that there is some… anxiety about cops suddenly showing up. You make more notes in this room than you did in an entire neighbourhood.

‘Thank you,’ you say sincerely, and the diener takes the Durands back to processing.

-

The coroner’s reports for the bodies aren’t ready, of course, likely won’t be for several days at least. You’ll get no progress here today. You have to step out just to get the fumes of isopropanol out of your sinuses.

Outside, you spot Knight leaning against the bonnet of his Saber in a rare patch of sunshine, smoking. You’ve barely known this man an hour, but it strikes you as out of character that he’d step away from Walther for even a moment. Knight seems to catch the question in your gaze and nods down at the pack of smokes in his breast pocket.

‘No smoking inside,’ he says.

You nod. To hell with it. ‘Can I trouble you?’

He seems surprised but tosses you the packet. They’re not Astras, instead some brand you can’t read the name of, all sharp sweeping calligraphic characters, and you hazard a guess that it must come from Seol or adjacent. You pluck one out. It smells divine even before you light it, a hint of menthol and–is that rose? You know this one cigarette will stay with you for years to come. Hell, you might remember it for the rest of your life: that time you shared a smoke with Hideki Knight.

You don’t know what to say, so you say nothing, just lean against the wall a few feet away from him. Knight doesn’t seem to care for the silence. He says something to you in a language you don’t understand. You just shake your head. He tries another, a little slower this time, and you have to stop yourself from frowning that he’s ruining this moment for you. (It’s not the first time an exchange like this has happened to you, and the discomfort is always the same.) You declare yourself ‘a Revacholiere’, and leave it at that. You never allow yourself to feel embarrassed at these things, but Knight hasn’t suppressed his.

He blushes, and apologises, and that’s rare enough that you find you respect him for it. More so, when you realise his accent is as Revacholian as yours, just textured with polyglotism: he is only trying to stretch his muscles.

‘So,’ he says around his cigarette, ‘you and Du Bois.’ He tries to play it cool, like he's indifferent, but you know better–an affected cool like that takes years to master, and though he's got the stylings, he's not quite there yet. Underneath that standoffish exterior, he’s… relieved.

You don't try to play dumb, there's no point with this one. ‘It is obvious?’ you ask.

‘To them, no.’ He makes a grand gesture at the world at large. ‘To us?’ He jerks his head toward the morgue doors, indicating Walther, the microcosm of the underground and all within a hundred metre radius who inhabit it. ‘Hell, we can smell it.’

‘Like recognises like,’ you say. ‘But what gave us away?’

Knight cocks a brow at you. ‘Have you seen the way he dresses?’

You laugh. ‘Only every day.’

He smiles for the first time you’ve seen. ‘And he orbits you. Like a moon.’

‘Funny, you do the same with Walther.’

Knight nods. ‘He’s the only family I have. And now he doesn't have any.’ You see him now as he is: a scared little boy disguising himself as a barking dog.

‘He has you,’ you remind him.

When you try to return his divine floral cigarettes, he waves you off, ‘Keep them’, and you decide that this one didn’t count today.

-

When Walther finally steps out, Harry shadowing him, the young man looks beyond exhausted, eyelids dark and puffy, cheeks streaked, shoulders like Atlas, but remarkably he’s still upright. Knight stubs out his cigarette at once and goes to his side. Walther all but collapses into him.

Harry moves to your flank like it’s the most natural thing in the world. He whispers to you, ‘Can’t we just let them be for now? He’s seen enough.’

You shake your head. It’s not the bloated corpses or the smell, or even the brutality of human behaviour and the creative ways by which people find to disassemble each other, but it’s the times like this that make you hate the job: having to press someone further, keep them present in their own personal hellscape when they need to get out. You hated it with Klaasje, and you hate it now.

You give Walther your truest sorry. ‘Do you feel up to answering some questions?’

After a deep shit-compressing breath, he stands back from Knight and nods. He’s tough, this one. He’d make a good cop. You hope his father told him that.

-

Harry suggests the party should head to a local diner, somewhere there is food and hot coffee and neutral company, not the grim, procedural box of the 37th. He knows a place nearby, though it's one he's never been to, and explaining that to Walther and Knight seems more trouble than it is worth, but he does anyway. ‘So I say to Kim: “Just call me The Officer”.’ He’s laughing, trying to relieve some of the tension as the four of you are sat across from each other in a sticky vinyl booth waiting for refills and strawberry pie.

‘Anyway,’ you try to redirect, taking out your notebook with a deliberate click of your pen. ‘If it's alright with you, Walther?’

With some colour finally restored to his cheeks, he gives another one of those stoic nods.

You look to Harry, let him lead, and he starts soft. ‘Tell us about your father, Walther.’

Something flags you that he says ‘father’ and not ‘family’, but you let it pass. Walther tells you about Abraham Durand: that he was hard-working, stalwart, somewhat emotionally-distant and introverted but never absent, always supportive. Nothing you didn’t already know from asking around the 37th, but hearing it from Walther at least lets you strike ‘family annihilation’ from the case with a satisfying finality.

‘Pa paid for my treatment,’ Walther makes a point of saying. ‘Entirely out of pocket. That’s the kind of father he was.’

The man was a saint it seems, but still a member of the RCM.

‘Did your father have any enemies that you know of?’ you ask.

Walther looks between the pair of you, a half-laugh twisting the corner of his moustache. ‘Do you, officers?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ Harry says. ‘What are you implying?’ You’re only mildly embarrassed that blatant sarcasm seems to have surpassed him yet again.

‘He is implying,’ you say gently, ‘that you are an officer of the RCM. And so am I. Ergo, we have enemies by default.’

‘Well, I still wouldn’t know them,’ he says, and he’s right, you can’t argue that.

Walther gives him a look of kind pity. ‘You really did lose your memory.’

Harry looks to you helplessly.

You pat his shoulder. ‘It’s alright, detective, I’m sure you don’t have enemies personally. Regardless, we can be certain that Captain Durand did. Walther, anything you can recall might be a lead. Anything at all.’

The diner cast changes several times over the course of Walther squeezing his memory as best he can. You lose count of how many times the waitress refills your coffee. You fill several pages in your notebook. Specifically, you compile a list of cases Walther remembers his father working and closing–murders, drug busts, trafficking, racketeering–and a supplementary list of names that Durand sent into Moralintern hands. Durand’s body was a machine that turned arrests into convictions. It’s no wonder he made captain. A couple of his cases you even remember.

One case, or multiple cases as it was at the time, sticks out: the Breech Murders, as it became known. Back in ‘45, a string of murders across the entire city went seemingly unconnected but for the same make of bullet (and often bullets, plural) found in each of the victims. ‘Vic worked one of those cases!’ Harry says, suddenly possessed with a breakthrough memory. You were adjacent to them as well, but you were still working juvie at the time. It was Durand who connected them all to not to a single individual, but to multiple Madre peones, and moreover a weapons smuggling operation. Durand single-handedly swept an entire city clean of breech-loading, automatic firearms. If he made an enemy of anyone, it was–

‘Padre Madre!’ Harry says with Dick Mullenesque emphasis, as though he’s cracked the case through a hairline fracture and blown everything wide open. It would be nice if every case were so simple, wouldn’t it?

‘There is no evidence to suggest the Madre are involved here,’ you tell him.

‘There’s also no evidence that it wasn’t Madre. Peones started taking their bullets with them after the Breech Murders,’ he says, clearly having another breakthrough memory. ‘We didn’t find any bullets on site.’

You turn to face Harry. ‘There’s also no evidence that it wasn't flying purple dinosaurs. You don’t have to be a professional hitman to know that removing evidence, especially a murder weapon, from a crime scene is an easy way to stall an investigation.’

‘Dinosaurs aside, I think you have to be at least a little bit professional,’ he argues. ‘Normal people don’t carry guns. Normal people don’t know how to get bullets out of heads. I do, and I’m not normal.’

‘You are also not Madre. All I’m saying is: let’s not reach for imaginary suspects when we have more credible, concrete leads to follow up on.’

‘Okay, but all I’m saying is: let’s not rule them out either.’

‘Okay, sure.’ You pretend to make a note of it. ‘Suspect… was not… a “normal person”. Now all we have to do is establish what a “normal person” is, and then cross reference everyone in the city. Actually, no, that seems too easy. We should cross reference the entire population of Le Caillou, just to be sure. There. Are you satisfied?’

‘Suspects,’ Harry says, entirely undeterred by your savagery. He points at your notes. ‘Plural.’

You slam your notebook shut. ‘You also can’t know that!’

‘You also can’t rule it out!’

He’s not right, but he’s also not wrong, and it tests you when he finds these little spaces to wedge his imagination into. It’s the space where he can wear two caps at once: the dunce’s, and the Lieutenant’s, and both are perfectly fitted to his thick skull. The idiot who won’t stop. It makes you want to slap him, or maybe spank him, you're not sure.

Abruptly, you recall that you have company. You realise Walther and Knight have been watching you both this whole time with no small amount of amusement. Walther has a weak smile, Knight a smirk.

‘So, Wal, how long do you think they’ve been married?’ Knight says. ‘And how long do they have until divorce?’

Even through his grief, Walther manages to laugh. Knight slides a protective arm about his shoulders when that laugh perishes into silence. His eyes water again. You’ve seen this many times: the end of the latency period where victims of radiation are still something of themselves, lucid enough for an interview, before the shock begins to wear off and the skin of the world peels away, and the gravity of it all has pulled them past the event horizon of realisation that this will be the rest of their lives.

‘My apologies, gentlemen,’ you say, sitting up straight. ‘I can assure you Detective Du Bois and I do have a functional partnership. And we are committed.’

Walther shakes his head. ‘I can tell,’ he says sagely. ‘I’m glad it’s you two.’

Something about the way he says it, as though he’s glad it’s not someone else working the case, and you’re suddenly reminded of Granger. You make a mental note to follow up on that.

-

There’s no case information Walther has given you that you couldn’t have obtained from the precinct records themselves, but his perspective at least gives you a framework and a lens through which to view. You suspect there will be hours if not days of file scouring in yours and Harry’s future. It makes you wish Marlene’s were closer.

It’s late evening by the time you and Harry walk Walther and Knight back to the Saber. You give Walther a slip of paper with three phone numbers: the 37th (no sense assuming he knows that one by heart), the 41st, and the number of your complex, just in case. Knight borrows Harry’s ledger to write their home number, the one in Le Jardin.

‘Keep us updated,’ Knight says, leaning out the driver’s side window, and it almost sounds like a threat. You just nod and pat the cigarettes in your breast pocket.

Harry moves to the passenger side. Through the window, he puts a hand on Walther’s shoulder. You see Knight’s eyes and nostrils flare again, but he says nothing.

‘I promise you, Walther,’ Harry says, and your heart begins to sink already, ‘I will find them. I will find who killed your pa.’

You’ve heard it before. Promises often made and rarely kept. You don’t judge him for it. The RCM operates on promises as much as it operates on currency. Hope and instant coffee.

You watch the Saber pull smoothly from the kerb and glide away into the night traffic until the headlights become distant haloes through your lenses, and you think that if nothing else you got to see that beautiful creature today, even if it cost you the sight of four dead bodies yet again. Harry nudges you back into focus.

‘Guess what?’ he says.

‘What, detective?’

He hands you his ledger. ‘I got Hideki Knight’s phone number for you.’

‘So you did. Remarkable. That definitely was not on my bingo card.’

‘You oughtta call him sometime.’ He elbows you roughly. ‘Tell him how much you like him.’

You’ll indulge him, just a little. ‘He’s not my type.’

Harry sighs dramatically. ‘It’s okay, Kim, I understand. He’s way cooler than me. And younger. And hotter. And rich as Filippe. I can’t possibly compete with all that.’

Well, now he’s just baiting you. ‘Okay. Very funny. The joke is over now.’

‘What a day, huh?’

‘Mhm.’

‘Long ass fuckin day. I think I need a cigarette.’

‘I need an orgasm.’

He does a doubletake at you. You take his ledger and shove it flat against his chest, lean in just enough for him to smell you, the floral menthol smoke still lingering on your skin. ‘Maybe two.’ The blunt, unaffected delivery sends him the colour of poppies. He nearly drops the ledger. ‘You can help if you want.’

He just nods aggressively.

It starts to rain again, and you and Harry jog back to the Taube. It’s cold inside the cabin, and the pre-heater struggles like a bear waking from hibernation. Harry’s palm is warm on your thigh.

‘Take me home, Mr Cooper. I want to slip into something more comfortable.’

-

You're barely inside the door to #7 before he’s upon you, already shucking his clothes and yours. You leave the lights off and let him manhandle you in the slatted glow of the streetlights through the blinds. There's a devotion in the way he unties your boots, sliding your cargos down so he can kiss up the side of your leg from ankle to hip. The moment he has you nude, he scoops you up. You can't help a laugh as he carries you to the bed, drops you unceremoniously into the sheets. He gazes down at your naked body with the kind of fierce attention he gives to a puzzle, like you're something to be unlocked, and you know that he is in control tonight. He climbs atop you, knees in between your thighs and that alone has you hard, the hot weight of him bearing down on you. How many times have you imagined this?

He resumes his worship of you, kissing into the sweet little concave of your sternum, in perfect symmetry between your lungs. He trails his lips up over your collar bones and neck, breathing the smell of your skin again.

‘You smoked?’ he says.

‘Outside the morgue.’

‘Not Astra.’ He burrows in, scents you. ‘Menthol and… cherry.’

So that’s what it was. ‘Knight’s. Gave me one of his.’

He grazes his teeth against your larynx, playful, but there’s an edge to it. It does something for you. Your hand finds your cock, no movement, you just hold yourself while his lips drag up the side of your jaw, come to rest behind your ear.

‘I want to be inside you.’ Gravel voice, animal, barely restrained. You feel the rumble of it in your throat. Something snake-like coils deep through your gut. ‘Do you want that?’ He's not begging, but he asks like he's in a cage, like your answer will either lock or open the door.

Let him out, you monster.

‘Yes,’ you murmur, and he's already pushing your knees up and apart.

He shifts down the bed, kissing down your core as he moves, his mouth laying a trail of reverence: the length of your body is a pilgrimage and between your thighs is a church. But he glides straight past your straining cock like it's no more than an obstacle to his true goal.

‘What are you–oh, fuck!’

His tongue circles you, the only warning he gives, and then pushes inside. You let yourself go to cover your mouth with both hands. He laves at you, mouths and slavers over you, eats you. No, he fucking devours you. Like you’re a goddamn banquet and he’s been starving for years. (In another life, he was really good at this, eating holes, regardless of their shape or the person attached to them, and that muscle memory hasn’t left him it seems.)

But his whiskers tickle your asscheeks. You squirm, laughing despite yourself, until suddenly he's holding your hips down with one hand, pressing fingers into you with the other. Curling them, coiling into your prostate, stroking you from the inside.

‘Goddammit, Harry, enough teasing!’

You wriggle out of his grip enough to reach for a condom on the bedside. Harry doesn’t need to be scolded twice, already sitting up, holding himself, waiting and ready for you. You fumble the condom, can’t get the damn thing on him quickly enough. He puts his hands over yours to steady them, helps you roll the latex down his cock. He almost looks bigger with it on.

Then he pushes you back down into the pillows, situates himself between your legs. He’s a sight there: round belly hanging forward, hairy chest faintly glistening with sweat already, broad hand on his dick.

He isn’t done teasing you. He takes himself and presses his tip over your taint, drags it down into the hollow of your ass just to rub himself back and forth across you. Like he wants you to beg for it.

‘Hurry up,’ you hiss.

He looks up at you with surprise, and then smirks. ‘Oh? I don’t know, Kim, it doesn’t sound like you want it that badly.’

‘Oh, no you don’t. I’m not here to play games with you.’

‘What a shame,’ he sighs. ‘I guess you really don’t want it.’ He rubs himself down, around, over your fucking hole, but never pushing forward.

‘Just put it in me!’

‘Put what in you?’

You give him a wholly unmasked glare.

‘I wanna hear you say it,’ he says, singsong. ‘You said you knew cock, Kim. Say it. Say you want my cock.’

‘Connard!’

‘Good enough,’ he sneers.

As much a bastard in the sheets as in the streets. He gains you in rough, aggressive shoves, opening you up further with each ingress, until finally he's pushing down to his utmost, and you can hear yourself whimpering. He's thick, thicker than he looks (or maybe it’s just been a while, Kitsuragi), enough to test your pain threshold in a way that's exquisite, overwhelming, your hands grabbing uselessly at the sheets. It’s the sensation you have craved when your mind has wondered about his body while your hands have wandered between your thighs. He's warm and full and he hurts.

‘Am I hurting you?’ he says. He knows he is, of course he does; that's not what he's asking. He's asking if you want him to keep on hurting you.

‘Yes,’ you breathe. ‘Do not stop.’

‘Put your arms around me.’

You obey, put your arms around his shoulders, legs around his waist, and cling to him like he's a lifebuoy. He hugs one arm up underneath the small of your back, lifting you off the mattress until you're floating beneath him. You close your eyes and there is nothing but him, no earth beneath you, just his body, inside you, around you, holding you aloft from everything. There is no feeling like it, to be completely absent from the world but for the man in your arms.

And then he starts to move. He surges forward, and your body takes the full force of his hips, helpless to do anything but move with him. ‘Fuck…’ The sound of your voice is incentive, and he bucks forward again, pushing the breath out of you, and harder again just to pull more noises from you. There's no way he can maintain this, holding your entire weight whilst he fucks you, but it's a fine thing while it lasts, the heavy fullness, your body suspended by his. Already he's panting with the effort it's taxing him just to hold you up, let alone fuck you this way.

‘Harry.’ You paw his hair back from his face so you can press your lips to his cheek. ‘You’ve made your point. Put me down and fuck me,’ you tell him.

The relief in him is almost palpable as he lays you back down into the sheets and pillows. Heavy breathing and tight biceps. His cock slips out momentarily, and the emptiness is purgatory. You huff at his absence and he quickly shifts you, kneeling with his thighs under yours, and you have an obscene view looking up at your own hips and cock as he adjusts you back onto his own.

Then, oh then, he fucks you. With both hands on your hips, he pulls you down onto his cock. He builds a rhythm that way, this infernal shove and yank that he does with your body, each impact of his hips against your ass a dry slapping sound.

He's rough, and you don't want him to be gentle. You don't want him restrained or censored, you want the rawness of him. You want the bitterness, the aggression, everything he can't show you in the daylight. It hurts, how it fucking hurts, but it's Harry, unfiltered, unmuzzled. He groans like a dragon uncoiling from a deep sleep, long hissing breaths. At some point he pulls out just to manhandle you again, and you find yourself face down on your elbows and knees, ass up, easy for him. A sprinkle of lubricant here and there, and he fucks you with possession, his hands gripping so tight around your little waist that his fingers almost touch across your belly.

‘You feel so good,’ he tells you. ‘God, I don't wanna come, I just wanna fuck you forever.’

You twist your body, turn your head to look at him over your shoulder. Eye contact, and he takes the hint, leaning in for your kiss. You taste yourself on him, your own sweat and spunk, and it disgusts you in a way that makes you think about sucking him after he's done fucking you. He moans into your mouth as you clench your pelvic floor on him. He swears, and you can feel him throb through you, a desperation caught between needing to release and not allowing himself to.

‘I wanna hear you come,’ he begs you. ‘I wanna feel it.’

You're close. Hell, you have been since he first put his tongue in you, his anything, his all of it.

‘Make me,’ you goad him.

He snarls and his hips snap forward. He becomes frantic, thrusts hard and arrhythmic, and it's less of a build and more of an inevitability when you feel the coil of climax sink through your belly. You've never been performative in bed, but you can tell he likes noise, he wants some pageantry, (he would fuck the sound out of you anyway) so you lift the censor just a little: you let him have a soft, shuddering moan as you come into your hand.

It seems that isn't enough for him. It's the desperate, beaten whimpers he bucks out of you, the overstimulated curses as he fucks you well past your orgasm and into a place of pain.

‘Harry, please–’

He comes with a yell and a shudder, the weight of him falling over you, a felled beast, his claws digging into your ribs as he rides out the pulses of himself, swearing. He lingers slack there for a time after he’s done, slick with sweat, his hot breath coming fast against the nape of your neck, crushing you into the bed with his entire body. He feels like an afternoon in Revachol summer: blazing, soporific, comforting in its humid heaviness.

Moments pass and he slowly relaxes, coils his arms around your chest, sighing into your hair as he warms his softening cock in you for a time. He whimpers sweetly into your shoulder, rubbing his cheek on you. He’s still hurting you even now, but there’s a kind of peace in it, something that pulls on the thread between you, that one that’s been present since Martinaise. A silent understanding that you will hurt each other, and it will be necessary and never more than either of you can withstand.

You only resent it a little when he finally has to pull from you, has to do all those mundane human things: toss the condom, take a piss, clean himself, gulp straight from the bathroom faucet. You lay belly down in your wet patch, idly watching him and thinking you could happily watch this again, watch him be disgustingly human if he’s your human. He comes back to you, flaccid cock sagging between his thighs, and sets a glass of water on your bedside as he kisses your forehead.

-

‘Shit, these are good,’ Harry says around one of Knight’s cigarettes, having fished the pack out of your jacket.

He’s sitting back against the headboard with you tucked in against his side, your head resting on his hip. You allow yourself to take the smoke from him once or twice, and you can taste the barest hint of yourself on the filter. It gives the room a strange bouquet: sweat and menthol, cum and cherry. Filth and flowers; it’s very Harry.

‘What?’ he says, gazing down at you with a smirk, and you realise you’ve been staring at him.

Finally, your brain catches up to something he said yesterday, the meaning of it.

‘You really can’t remember… this?’ You make a grand gesture over the bed, the debauched sheets, your legs in a lazy tangle. ‘With anyone else?’

‘Besides her?’ he says, and you instantly regret asking. He just shakes his head. ‘Nope.’ He takes another drag, and you don’t detect any emotion behind it. If it still taxes him to think of her, then he has learned to mask it well.

‘So,’ you dare to press him, ‘you mean to say you haven’t… slept with anyone since Martinaise?’

‘Guess not. You worried about contracting some sort of grisly venereal disease from Horrid Du Bois?’

The thought had crossed your mind. But then if you’re being honest with yourself, you have engaged men far riskier than Harry Du Bois. He got clean, he got sober, and that was enough for your peace of mind. Besides, you trust him. Have done for some time. ‘Not worried. Just curious.’

‘What about you?’ he says. ‘Seen anyone, I mean?’

You shake your head. ‘It’s difficult for me to… form meaningful connections. And I can’t do intimacy without connection. Work leaves little room for either, and casual encounters are not my speed. At least, not anymore. I’m too old for that scene.’

‘Nor mine,’ he agrees. ‘I tried, once or twice, but couldn't, you know, “follow through” as you like to put it.’

There’s something unsaid in the air that whatever it is between you, it does not fall into the realm of ‘casual encounters’. Harry gives you the last of the cigarette, rolls onto his side and lays an arm across your belly, fingers drawing little circles over your abdomen. It tickles.

‘Hey, you know what this means, right?’ He snickers like one of his “attic fantoms” has just told him a bawdy joke.

‘I do not.’

‘It means you took my virginity in this life.’

In this life. Like it’s a new one, a second chance, and in a way you suppose it is. It’s very glass-half-full of him. ‘Sure,’ you chuckle, ‘if that does it for you.’

‘It does. You’ve corrupted me, Kim Kitsuragi. I’m a flower, wilting just for you.’ He makes a show of swooning as he slides down the bed, hand over his forehead. ‘Say you’ll make an honest man of me, won’t you?’

You smirk. ‘How very… traditionalist of you.’ You take a last drag and exhale it into his face.

He closes his eyes and breathes you deep. ‘And here you said you were bad at sex.’

‘I said I didn’t think I was anything special, not that I was bad at it. Your standards are none of my concern.’

‘My standards are actually very high, thank you very much.’

‘Well, I’m flattered.’ You stub out the cigarette. It should have satisfied your lips, soothed you and readied you for sleep, but there’s still an energy beneath the calm, something that needs extinguishing. You prop yourself up on an elbow and look at Harry. ‘The fact remains, you have made me come more times than I have made you do the same.’

He shrugs, smiling warmly. ‘I’m not counting.’

‘I am always counting.’

He laughs. ‘What do you want, Kim?’

‘I want to suck your cock.’

His cheeks blossom with the poppies again, and he makes a goblin-like sound. ‘Heh, he said cock.’

Mere minutes later, you’re spitting a generous mouthful of cum into the bathroom sink. Harry (writhing with afterglow and hanging half upside down over the edge of the bed) makes a whining noise.

‘Aw, you quitter. I was really hoping you’d swallow.’

‘Eat shit,’ you say around your toothbrush, smiling.

-

Through the night, you and Harry still suffer the little dance of trying to get comfortable sleeping beside another human. It’s something to work on, but in the blurry dark you have this soothing sense that there will be time, and there will be space for it, the working on it. You want to work on it, on yourself, with him. You don’t sleep soundly, but you do sleep, and waking beside him in all his sleep rot, his eyes crusted with sand and beard tacky with drool, is a comfort all its own that you never expected.

This morning feels different somehow, but you can’t place why. You don’t talk, don’t need to, as you rise together, sliding into what is beginning to feel like a routine: he makes you coffee, you lay out your clothes, you shower together, he puts his hands on you, you press your hips against his as you kiss him under the spray.

The taste of intimacy gives you the courage you need to ask him what you couldn’t last night. ‘May I be… frank with you?’ you say.

‘Are you even capable of being otherwise?’ he chuckles, loading his hair with shampoo.

You roll your eyes. ‘The other night, you couldn’t…’

‘Get it up?’ Bless his candour sometimes.

‘I was going to say “follow through”, but yes. You couldn’t “get it up”. Last night, you could. What changed?’

He shrugs as he rinses. ‘Like most men, I’m the captain of my soul, and not the master of my dick.’

‘I don’t think that’s it. I think you were distracted. By the case.’

He laughs. ‘No. If anything, the fucking is a distraction from the case.’

Curse his candour sometimes. That smarts you some. You’re sure it’s not intentional, but goddamn him, when he fumbles you, you drop. ‘It’s not a distraction to me,’ you tell him.

He catches on quickly, reaching for your hand. ‘Kim, I didn’t mean it that way–’

‘I know.’ You squeeze his fingers softly. ‘And I know you have been… frustrated with me.’

He’s quiet, like he doesn’t want to acknowledge it, but he won’t lie either.

‘It upset you when I said Walther was a suspect.’

‘You were just being a cop, saying cop things. You changed your mind when the evidence persuaded you. I’m not holding it against you, I promise.’ He gestures for you to turn around, and he conditions your hair for you, massaging your scalp and neck in a way that makes you want to spend years in this shower. (You’re grateful when he doesn’t comment on your hair shedding.)

‘And I also know you were worried about that boy,’ you tell him.

‘What, you mean Walther? I… Well, sure, I guess so.’

‘You knew he was not the killer. And your mind made the next leap to consider if he had been an intended victim. You didn’t know where he was, if he was safe. It bothered you.’

Harry shrugs again and puts his chin on your shoulder, arms loose around you. ‘He’s safe now. And he always was, I suppose. He has Knight.’

‘A young man you had never met, another man’s son, and you were worried for his safety.’ You thread your fingers through his where they rest over your belly.

He says nothing for a time, and then, quietly: ‘He’s a son of the RCM. That makes him our son. All of us.’

If you ever heard someone call Harry Du Bois a shit cop, you would disagree, but if you ever heard him called a shit human being, you would fight. With your bare hands. Even if you knew you couldn’t win, you would put up one hell of a fight.

Chapter Text

Innumerable files have exploded across every surface of Durand’s office (your designated office away from office), stacks weighted down by a platoon of empty coffee mugs, the floor a graveyard of discarded folders. Harry has gone deep-case saturation diving, and has shut off all communications but internal. He’s been like this for hours, pacing back and forth between the desk and cabinets, never fewer than two case files in each hand. It almost shames you, his ability to hold himself below surface for so long. Your eyes are hurting from straining at endless black text on white paper; all you see are ants crawling across the pages.

‘Detective,’ you beg him, and it takes him several minutes to depressurise, to allow himself to be led out for lunch, and even then, he’s silent, the inner workings of his mind still awash with case files that may or may not be relevant to the Durand murders. He’s barely spoken more than a handful of words all day. You almost welcome it when he gets distracted by the bright yellow halo of the Frittte across from station 37 and returns with a bag of multicoloured hard-boiled candy (Jamrock Rock is printed on the label). Almost.

Back in Durand’s office, you hear a definitive crunch every five minutes or so, and then subsequent followup crunching. You glance up at Harry from the floor and watch his hand slip into the candy bag with habitual regularity. You see his fingers claw for what is obviously his favourite flavour (the green ones), and slip the solid lump of sugar into his mouth. You can almost feel his impatience in real time, the few seconds it takes him to decide mouthing the candy is not an efficient delivery and he begins to chew loudly instead. It's funny to you the first time. And then it continues, over and over–rustle, pop, crunch, repeat–and you wish he'd just finish the damn bag and be done with it.

Finally you hear the scrunching of a plastic bag, relieved as he tosses it into the wastebin. Then he produces a second bag from his pocket. It's infuriating to watch.

‘Officer,’ you say flatly, and his eyes snap to you like a child caught mid cookie jar. ‘Enough. Please.’

He sheepishly puts the candy back in his pocket. ‘Sorry.’

You both continue on in silence, and somehow that is worse than his incessant biting. Instead, you hear the obtrusive wet sound of his tongue moving about in his mouth, chasing fragments and unsticking sugar from between his teeth. As if it weren’t already a chore trying to focus on someone else’s paperwork. His mouth is the last thing you need on your mind right now.

‘You know,’ you try to end the torture, ‘they last longer if you suck on them.’

Harry snorts. He waits for you to make eye contact with him. ‘Nothing I suck on ever lasts long.’

Your ears flood with warmth and you hate it, how easily he disarms you. You have to remind yourself: you chose this, you let him get his hooks in. You try your hardest to look unaffected, but you can't help it, you're laughing with him despite yourself, hanging your head. He gives you a self-satisfied smirk and takes the candy out again, offers the bag to you.

‘Have one with me. Just one more.’

You shake your head.

‘Oh, go on.’

‘Will you promise to suck it?’ You give him The Brow.

His cheeks go ruddy. ‘Oh, Kim, I promise.’

You take a bullseye and he grins at you.

-

That night, in #7, he looks pig-in-mud pleased with himself when he brings you off in his mouth. And he’s right: you didn’t last long when he really got to it, doing that thing where he throat-fucks himself on you. He sits back on the bed with folded arms, puckers his lips at you for a moment and then pokes his tongue out, slick and ropey with your spend.

‘Put that away,’ you sigh.

He shrugs. ‘If you say so.’ He rolls his head back and makes a show of gulping and licking his lips clean after. ‘See? That’s how it’s done.’

Your dick twitches, and you pretend you’re unaware. ‘Demonstrate all you like. I am never doing that.’

He’s definitely aware. His hands are on you again, a little questioning push between your thighs, and you lazily lift them up and apart for him so he can get to opening you. You aren’t going to deny him, not when you can see how hard it has made him just to please you.

-

There’s an unspoken agreement between you: that this kind of behaviour only happens after hours, after nightfall (even if the flirting bleeds through in the daylight). You are careful, especially spending so much time at the station. You find reasons to get away from Harry–lunch runs, coffee, chats with the other officers–anything to make it seem you are not attached at the hip. If there is a sense around the 37th that anything… unprofessional is happening between you both, well, it escapes your notice. You worry about it, but you know you’re not the first and only officer to be under scrutiny for fucking his partner. You witness that the officers of the 37th all regard Granger with respect and dignity to her face, but you hear whispers when her back is turned. This is a thread you need to pull.

You make an effort to ingratiate yourself with some of the officers, the juniors and patrols. You buy a box of almond croissants from a local bakery (though they don’t hold a candle to Marlene’s), and suddenly you’re popular with half the wing. Even Bianco warms to you.

You look for Cartier. Being the closest to Granger, you want to ask her about the Acting-Captain’s relationship with the late Captain Durand. But she’s scarce. ‘She’s working a racketeering case,’ Bianco tells you forthcomingly when you ask Cartier’s whereabouts. ‘Mazda. Protection racket, I think.’ It seems unlikely you’ll be catching Cartier any time soon. Perhaps the direct approach is the best one.

When you head back upstairs to Granger’s office, Harry is already there engaging her, a case folder under his arm. He’s wearing his Teratorn bolo tie today; his “breakthrough tie”, as he calls it. (Statistically, he has in fact had more case breakthroughs while wearing it than he has any other item of clothing, but it remains to be seen whether the tie has any supranatural power or if it’s simply a matter of his attitude while wearing the thing. You’d call it a self-saucing pudding. ‘A what?’ ‘A self-fulfilling prophecy.’) Granger is sitting with arms folded, looking only mildly annoyed at his interruption, and now yours. She has a cigarette in one hand and in the other a cup of burnt, black coffee that smells like mazut.

‘Frankly the Moralintern doesn’t give a shit about where it all ends up as long as it’s out of public hands,’ she’s saying, apropos of whatever he’s bothering her about. ‘Like any other Responsibilité, if they can palm it off to the RCM, they will. Why build warehouses for contraband when it’s already in storage?’

‘Khm.’

Harry looks up when you enter. He has a lollipop in his mouth, lord knows where he got it from.

‘Kim, is that true? Does all seized property just collect dust in our vaults?’

You nod. ‘That is correct.’

‘Just another way the coalition likes to gum up our gears.’ Granger ashes into an ashtray shaped like a bulldog and slouches behind her desk. ‘But I’m surprised you didn’t already know that, lieutenant.’

‘It’s a long story,’ you and Harry say in accidental unison.

She just laughs. ‘And anyway, why do you ask, Mrs Cooper?’

Harry presents the folder and flips to a particular file. It’s a file from The Breech Murders, something to do with inventory. ‘All the breech-loading firearms,’ he says, ‘the ones Durand had confiscated back in ‘45. The majority were stored here in the basement, correct?’

‘Tell me about it. It took over a year to catalogue all that scheiße.’

‘To your memory, were there silenced weapons?’

Granger looks at him strangely, but nods. ‘Quite a few.’

‘And they’re still here in holding?’

‘Durand had all the crates moved to the lower basement a few years ago. Deep storage.’

‘Uh huh. And how often do you check the lower basement inventory?’

You almost regret leaving Harry alone. Wherever his mind has led him, you have entirely no clue how (or if) any of this relates to the case at hand, but something about his conviction has your curiosity wrestling back your judgement for now. You want to see where this leads.

Granger frowns. She stubs out her cigarette in the bulldog’s jowls and leans forward across her desk. ‘Again, why do you ask?’

-

There’s no elevator down to the lower basement (The 37th operates out of a pre-war lowrise.), just a dim, grubby stairwell that descends into the earth. You can smell must and rust and mould (indelible floodlines on the walls from when the Esperance has broken her banks during wet summers). Granger leads you and Harry to the evidence and contraband cage. The fluorescents buzz and flicker and the old cast iron door squeals on its hinges.

Shelves upon shelves of boxes, crates and plastic bags filled with the paraphernalia of RCM case history. Drugs, weapons, blood-stained clothing, children’s toys, books, tools, shoes, anything and everything, all the detritus of crime going back at least two decades. Harry immediately locates the inventory logbook, flips through until he finds what he’s looking for: a catalogue number for the Breech Murder weapons.

‘You could have just asked,’ Granger says with a roll of her eyes. She beckons. ‘This way.’

She takes out a flashlight and leads you down a long aisle. There doesn’t appear to be much order to the clutter, boxes labelled and stacked wherever there’s room and then left to rot. The 41st (and the 57th) has a room just like this: the mausoleum of closed and cold cases that can’t be buried and can’t be revived, rarely visited and even more rarely organised.

You sense Harry lagging behind you, and turn to see his flashlight cast upon a stack of gaff-taped plastic sacks filled with a yellowing white substance. Cocaine, presumably. (Arguably not the best quality either, or else it would have been seagulled long ago by other officers of the 37th. That, or the RCM just makes ‘em different this side of the river.)

You halt and wait for him, but don’t say anything. You think you hear him mutter something like ‘whatever man’, and you gather he must be having an argument with at least one of the attic fantoms. Whatever the outcome of that dialogue, he leaves the ancient spoil unmolested. He notices you observing him, just gives you a pleasant smile and moves on; there’s no strain about it, no weakness, and it makes you want to slip your hand into his as he passes. He resists, and you almost can’t do the same, almost.

Granger waits at the end of the row, her light trained on a stack of pinewood crates. The timber is swollen with years of moisture damage. Harry is still browsing through the logbook.

‘Kim, count the crates for me.’

You don’t ask why. ‘Twelve.’

‘Captain, there should be thirteen.’

‘What?’ Granger moves to his side to check the entry, and then doubletakes at the crates.

Harry puts the log down on a shelf and produces a prybar (from… somewhere?) to open one of the crates. The damp wood protests, nails squealing as he forces the lid up and off. Inside, there is mouldy packing straw, and nothing else. He opens another crate, and finds the same. A third, and again, nothing. A forth, and finally a few dregs: single- and double-barrel handguns with swollen wooden grips that have rendered them useless, not worth taking. You hear Harry murmur to himself: ‘No silencers.’

‘Gott,’ Granger hisses. ‘Fuck!’

‘Looks like you’ll need to do a full inventory,’ Harry says. ‘Captain, who has access to the cage?’

‘I’ll have to make a list and get back to you on that.’

‘Make sure you keep that list to yourself,’ you say. ‘And consider having the locks changed.’

‘Oh, well dankefuckingschön, Herr Cooper,’ she spits. She sighs deeply and pats a rough hand on Harry’s shoulder. ‘Apologies, lieutenants. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. Now get back to your actual investigation please.’

Harry takes the lollipop stick, well-chewed, from his mouth. He studies Granger a moment, and you know he’s assessing, reading her for tells, asking himself if he really should have brought this to her attention in the first place, if perhaps she already knew about it and suddenly he’s made an enemy of himself. All this in real time in the space of a few seconds. She clocks him reading her, and suddenly you feel the gravitational pull of your holster beneath your jacket. You keep your hands firmly clasped and wait for a signal.

‘I didn’t know about this,’ she promises him, and makes eye contact with you as well. ‘I didn’t.’

Harry nods, seemingly satisfied. ‘Do you think Durand did?’

She sighs again. ‘I don’t know that, either.’

Another nod. ‘Alright. C’mon, Kim.’

You decide that now is not the time to ask Granger if she was fucking Abraham Durand.

-

Drives to and from the 37th are no longer silent. Driving back to La Belle Poule, Harry is telling you his theory, flakes of almond croissant flying across the dashboard as he gestures wildly.

‘He knew! Durand, I mean.’

You brush pastry crumbs off the leather. ‘You think he was orchestrating it? Weapons smuggling?’

‘No, it doesn’t seem like him. This guy had a case record to rival Pryce. Why would he round them up just to clear them out again? But I don’t know, maybe? Either he was found out, or he did the finding out. No one would murder a decorated RCM captain and his entire family for weapons smuggling–that is, unless someone else sniffed him out? Granger, maybe? No, she didn’t know. I believed her.’

‘I did too,’ you add. And, if only to touch the brakes on his thought-train: ‘Do you think Granger and Durand…?’

‘Hm? Oh, definitely, they were fucking. Or she wanted to fuck him.’

‘I thought so.’

‘But shush, the fucking’s not relevant to the case, don’t distract me.’ You blink repeatedly. Wow. You’ve been fucking told. ‘Anyway. Not Durand, not Granger, but if it were someone else in the 37th. And he knew about it? I think he found out, maybe even caught them red-handed, whoever’s been moving those breech-loaders. He found out, and it got him killed.’

‘You can’t know–’ You shake your head at yourself. There’s no sense in arguing with him, not when he is bound to solve this jigsaw, in one way or another, even if he hasn’t collected all the pieces yet. You can still poke holes in his theory, but it’s not to dissuade him; if anything, it’s to motivate him. Connect the frames. Funny, you used to resent being a sounding board for him, until you realised it meant he needed you. ‘If Durand caught them in the act, why not kill him on the spot? Why kill his entire family?’

Harry smiles at you warmly. ‘Oh Kim.’ He pats a hand on your knee fondly. ‘You just can’t think like a criminal.’

You roll your eyes. ‘Don’t you “oh Kim” me, Mrs Cooper. Go on then, make it make sense to me.’

‘Durand finds out who the smuggler is. They find out he knows. They kill his entire family to make it look like an annihilation-suicide. And they count on sloppy policework, or the possibility that the 37th as a whole won’t want to look too closely into their captain committing murder-suicide.’

‘If Durand knew, why wouldn’t he share that information with his colleagues? Granger, for starters.’

‘Maybe he didn’t know who to trust? Maybe he knew it was happening, but didn’t know who was making it happen.’

‘Making the generous assumption that you are right,’ you offer, ‘who is the recipient of these weapons? And who could this person, or persons, be that they needed an entire family dead to hide their operation?’ You know what he’s going to say even before he says it.

At a red light, you turn to look at him and he has the Dick Mullen special: cocked brow and half-moon smile, one side of his face wreathed in shadow.

‘Madre,’ he growls.

You slouch against the window. ‘Not this again.’

‘Look, this is connected, Kim. It is, I know it! These murders feel like… a message. About what? I don’t know yet. To whom? Well, I don’t know that either. But whoever killed Durand, it was someone he knew. It had to be. The door was unlocked, there was no sign of forced entry, no sign of a struggle. He knew them, and he knew something about them that got his entire family killed.’

At length, you promise him, ‘I believe you.’

‘Wait, really?’

You nod. ‘I don’t believe your theory.’ Yet. ‘But I believe that this smuggling is connected to Durand somehow. And you did well to find it. It might have gone years unnoticed otherwise.’

As you turn into the driveway of La Belle Poule, you hear a sniffle. ‘Kim…’

You park the Taube outside #7 and kill the ignition. He still has his hand on your knee. There’s a beat where you look at each other and a kind of tense, yet silly grin gets passed back and forth.

‘What?’ you sneer.

He’s sighing wistfully with his chin in his palm, gazing at you with hooded eyes and a sweet little pout, his face a playful chiaroscuro in the cool glow of the streetlights. Even a baroque oil painting would not do him justice. ‘I wanna make you come so hard.’

-

There is some argument about how he will make you “come so hard”. He wants to lay you down and run his hands and mouth over you like a supplicant begging for absolution. You want to ride him, like he’s paying you for it. It’s been years, and you barely remember what that feels like. ‘If it helps, I don’t remember what that feels like either,’ Harry chuckles. He lets you push him down into the sofa when you have him naked, his dick already solid and heavy between his thighs. He’s shivering some, though the room is warm with body heat already.

‘Nervous?’ you say.

He nods, his cheeks a delightful shade of pink. You smile, slide yourself into his lap with your hands on his chest, petting the coarse hair and admiring the way it tapers over his belly then thickens out again above his cock. You kiss him, slow, explorative, and he tastes like black coffee and powdered sugar.

‘Like we haven’t danced every night this week,’ you murmur into his lips.

‘I’m always nervous with you, you know that.’

You didn't know that. ‘Why?’

‘Well… I mean, look at you.’

‘What about me?’

‘C’mon, Kim. You're a goddamned work of art and you know it.’ Funny, given that you were just thinking the same about him.

‘Touch me,’ you tell him, and he obliges you happily.

Your skin feels sunburned where his callused hands graze up your thighs, over your hips, your waist. He hugs you in close against him, belly to belly, and you feel one of those hands trail down your lumbar, fingers parting your ass, tracing the rim of you. You get that fierce little pull in your gut, that thrill you had forgotten.

Of course, there’s that moment of awkward shuffling that comes with every fuck–the reaching for lubricant and protection, the getting those into the right places–but you don’t mind that, it’s part of it, the whole experience with him. (It wouldn’t be an encounter with Harry Du Bois without a little awkwardness for flavour.) But there’s only so long you can stand him playing with you, opening you, his fingers entirely not enough. He laughs when you slap his hands away, and gasps as you pull his dick under you, aligning him.

You sit on him, easing yourself down his shaft until you're saddled pleasantly on his wide hips. It’s better than you remember, the fullness, the burn, and you wonder if it’s just a fault of your memory, or if he simply feels that good, the size of him, the comfort of his arms coiling about your waist and the ache when he buries his face in your chest, lips on your skin. A shuddering, chest-deep groan rumbles through his ribs and into yours, and you’ve never felt so blended with another human being. You tuck your chin over his head, breathing the warm smell of his hair, cheap hotel shampoo, cigarette smoke, that savoury note that is just him, just Harry.

‘Fuck, Kim…’

You lift yourself off him an inch or so, only to slide right back down, tugging your own asscheeks apart to get a better purchase on his dick, really devour the damn thing. Harry whimpers, distraught. He breathes through a pursed mouth, exhaling a soft little ‘fff’ through his moustache, almost whistling as you rock your hips forward on him.

You’ve barely begun to fuck yourself with him when he grabs your waist abruptly, hissing: ‘Stop, stop!’

You slow to a halt. ‘What’s wrong?’

His eyes are clenched tight shut, like he’s concentrating. ‘It’s too much. I’m gonna– too soon!’

‘Really? Already? Pathetic.’

You’re just teasing him, of course. It doesn’t bother you. Actually, it’s kind of endearing, and you decide you’re gonna chase that thought. You push your ass forward, leaning into his grasp.

‘Kim!’ he bleats your name like a curse. ‘Kim, please!’

‘No,’ you tell him.

‘Shit fuck–’ You can feel him release, even through the sheath, a sudden rush of heat and a throbbing in his thighs. It feels good, but nothing even close to what you need. You start to roll yourself in earnest, a hand on your cock, knuckles flush against his sweaty gut.

You’re not deaf to his cries as he begs you to stop, not ignoring him; no, you’re eating it up, the desperation, the pain of over-stimulation, the wildness of him underneath you as he writhes. He’s trying to push you off, if only weakly, but you won’t let him, hugging your knees and thighs around his belly tight, tight enough to strangle him if you had him by the neck.

‘You thought I wouldn’t repay you for doing this to me?’

He makes some wretched, pitiful noise. Remarkably, he’s still hard.

‘This cock is mine,’ you tell him, taking a grip on his throat. ‘You can have it back when I’m done with you.’

‘Fuck…’

You squeeze, just enough to put pressure on his windpipe, thumbing through his beard. ‘Understood?’

He nods shakily, his eyes fluttering closed.

‘Mine,’ you enforce.

‘Yours.’ The word falls from his lips like a prayer.

-

He’s still yours a half hour later in the shower, your hands all over him, pushing suds across his skin. He’s plush and pliant, so willing as you press into him just enough to pass your tongue over his teeth, but there’s a distraction there, something flagging in his kiss, unresponsive.

‘What’s wrong?’ you say bluntly.

‘Nothing,’ he promises.

‘No, I’m not playing this game with you. Tell me.’

Gently, he pushes you back, but not away. ‘That was hot,’ he says, ‘really hot,’ and you can hear the comma.

‘But?’

‘But maybe warn me the next time you’re gonna do the… domination stuff? Or, you know, we talk about it first?’

Next time. The words hook through you again, the assumption behind them, that this would happen again, and keep happening. And you realise he doesn’t want it to keep happening this way. Shit. 

‘I…  I’m ashamed.’ Look at your feet, the water pooling.

‘You don’t need to be sorry, Kim. I enjoyed it, that side of you. I just wasn’t expecting it. Honestly? Everything… all of this, with you, is unexpected. You don’t give much away.’ He says it like it’s a privilege to see you, really see you, and you suppose it is, but the way he sees you, it feels like your sins are laid bare. You covet, and you covet jealously. Mine. ‘And I am yours,’ he agrees, like he can hear your thoughts, the bastard. ‘If you want.’ He cups your cheek, forces you to look at him.

You nod. ‘I do want.’

‘So,’ he says. ‘Maybe a safe word, for future?’

‘Agreed.’

He takes a beat, and then says: ‘Tangerine.’

Frankly, you don’t know what you expected, but you’re just relieved he didn’t say ‘disco’. ‘I hope you never have to use it.’

‘Au contraire,’ he chuckles, sliding his hands loosely, teasingly around your throat. ‘I hope I do.’

-

Days of nothingness. Days of chasing thin leads like a dog chasing its own tail. Days of canvassing, walking, interviewing, pulling threads until those threads run out, reviewing evidence, looking for something, anything, you might have missed. Days of mindlessness and disappointment, and a shared sense, one that neither of you want to acknowledge, that you can feel the days growing colder, just as you can feel the case doing the same. It feels absurd, and wrong, that all you have to recall the passing of each day are the acts you commit with Harry when you both stumble back into that tiny shitty hotel room at the end of each shift. Days of nothing, and then nights of everything. You fucking him, him fucking you. Coiled around each other like fire-breathing dragons in your little hotel lair barely big enough for the two of you. Both of you are aware of the fact: it’s becoming a habit, and you’re not going to stop, not when you’ve just begun.

Some nights, there’s a desperation about it: the door slams shut and your clothes are ripped off, crashing into each other, hurting each other in your need to get inside of one another, white knuckles gripping the headboard, sharing sweat and spit, lips never far from skin, his hand pulling yours away from your mouth as he bucks the sound out of you, and only moments of refractory reprieve before you’re upon each other again, possessed with some savage greed that won’t be satisfied until your bodies just fucking ache from it all.

Other nights, it’s peaceful: an absent-minded touch or a kind word as you eat diner dinner and diner sweets together cross-legged on the carpet, reviewing notes until you realise you’re not talking about work anymore, the conversation has drifted to that joke you heard on the radio, a fun little fact he knows about horticulture or art history or TipTop, and suddenly you find that he has crawled into your lap, head on your chest, and his hands are starting to wander, slow as stars passing through the night.

Regardless of how it happens, it happens almost every night.

You don’t feel the need to talk about it beyond what is necessary, and neither does Harry. You both fall into stride with it much the same as you have done with each other since that Monday in Martinaise, and it seems to go unsaid that it is necessary, a kind of debrief all its own after sundown each day.

(It does not go unsaid, and you’re both aware of the fact, that this arrangement is only temporary: this ease with which you can both share skin and space without scrutiny or suspicion. ‘You know,’ Harry says while you’re both showering after a lazy, slow fuck. ‘It almost seems a shame.’

You rinse the shampoo out of your hair and he passes the conditioner. ‘What does?’

‘Well, once we close this case, we’ll have to go home. Goodbye, La Belle Poule, hello again Jamrock.’

If we close this case.

You turn away from him and he massages your back for you, his broad hands like weapons against the tension in your shoulders. You sigh. ‘Do not let that be an incentive to derelict your duty.’ You say it out loud to yourself as much as to him. ‘This is one case we absolutely must close.’

‘I know,’ he says, a note of self-defense. His hands trail down your arms, your waist, and he grips you by the hips, tugging you back against him and you can feel his wet, half-hard cock graze your asscheek. ‘I only meant that, while we’re here, we really ought to make the most of this room, don’t you think?’

You agree, but you won’t give him the satisfaction. You turn around in his arms, slide yours up over his shoulders and kiss him sloppy, soggy beard and all. You grind your hips against his, feel his dick throb in contact with yours as your tongue fucks through his mouth. When you lean back to see his sweet face, he’s gazing at you with pupils the size of the moon.

‘Can I fuck you again?’ he begs you.

You make a sound equal parts laugh and sigh. ‘What was the point of the shower?’

‘Please?’

How can you say no to that face? ‘Let’s try something new.’ You push him back against the cold tile wall and he gasps as you take his cock and yours in one hand. You line yourself up with him, tug his foreskin towards you, over your tip, massage yourself through his skin.

‘Oh,’ he murmurs. ‘Oh, I like this.’

The next morning you find a note taped to the door as you’re leaving. Please try to limit shower use to no more than 30 minutes daily. - LBP Management)

Work, fuck, sleep, repeat. The sex becomes habit, yes, but there’s nothing routine about it. Each time is something new, whether it be a shift in how you arrange yourselves to fuck, or how much of yourself you bare to each other. Intimacy peeking out through the pornography of it all: his hand stroking through your hair even as he pulls it, your name on his lips when he comes, the way you stroke his cheek when you bite his lip, how you let yourself fall asleep in the haze with the knowledge he will clean up, take care of you.

It’s not always good. There’s the bad sex, the difficult sex. There are the nights when he can’t get it up for whatever reason (he’s distracted, he’s tired, he’s too in his head), or he simply can’t come, and he begs you not to feel defeated by his unruly dick. You do feel defeated, helpless to reason with your own determination to make him come, and even when he does, it’s no guarantee of peace.

There is one evening when he comes so brutally hard with you deep inside of him that his endocrine system smacks him immediately with cortisol. You’re not finished, but he’s rolling away from you, hands scrubbing down his face, suddenly crying wretched catharsis. (You've seen this before with other men; most were too proud to allow themselves to feel it, or they let themselves into the bathroom to run the faucet while they relieved their bladders and their eyes.) You don't try to comfort him until he seeks it from you, tossing back and forth, an arm flung across your chest, his face buried in the hollow of your neck, his whole frame shuddering.

(‘I’m sorry,’ he sobs, his breath coming in hot little puffs against your skin, ‘I’m so sorry. I don't know why this is happening. I don't know why I'm like this. I think I'm broken.’ You try to tell him it's merely post-coital tristesse, it’s hormonal, but he will not be swayed from the notion he is the problem, his grief is inexplicable and fundamentally different. ‘I hate this. I hate that I feel this fucking… spectrum of emotions every single day. The volume of it. I'm exhausted.’

You think you understand him a little better now, the reason he turned to substances in the past. Measurable, predictable. To have mastery over an unpredictable cocktail of hormones and bodily murmurings, not to mention the swell and churn that is just life happening at all times. No one likes to feel powerless inside their own body, the visceral presence of it all.

‘I understand,’ you tell him. ‘I get overwhelmed by... feeling, sometimes.’

His sobbing slows, like he’s surprised, and you choose not to be hurt by that. ‘What do you do about it?’

You don’t have an answer that is healthy. You’re used to repressing, not purging. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I should cry more often.’

This makes him laugh, and fondness stokes you.)

Bad, good or otherwise, one thing never changes, and that is laying there with him after each fuck (whether filthy and sweaty or fresh from a shower), your head on his chest or his arm, listening to the soft sounds of him breathing as you smoke your cigarette down to the filter. He takes it and stubs it out for you every time, and somehow that feels as gentlemanly as lighting it for you. He’s done a lot of that lately, the gentlemanly things, holding doors for you, making coffee, falling on the sword of food bills, and you wonder if that behaviour will continue or if it’s just one of his “copotype” phases. Gentleman cop. You like this one. It feels like it’s meant for you.

-

You can feel the unspoken agreement beginning to slide, to blur between the realms of allowed and not allowed. You were adamant to yourself that you would not allow fucking him to interfere with work, but naturally it bleeds some, just into the little moments, the stolen ones.

Like when he brushes his bruised knuckles against yours in stride, as though it were no more than an accident. When he tugs you into a shadowy alley just to kiss the side of your neck and whisper to you all his profane thoughts, all the things he wants to do with you when the sun is gone and you're back in that hotel room again. When he slides his hand up along your leg in the driver’s seat, palms your inner thigh.

Invariably, you push him away every time. Not here. Not now. Do not interfere. This is the line that must never be crossed, the line between habit and addiction.

He pouts every time you spurn him.

‘You’re no fun.’ He folds his arms and sinks deeper into the passenger seat.

‘Right now? Yes, I am no fun. But I think you will change your mind in a matter of hours.’

There’s an unveiled warning and a threat in your voice, and he shuts his fool mouth.

And it's not as though you don't think about the sex while you’re on shift, it's more as though ‘intimacy after hours’ has become just another addition to this dance you do with one another. Like the way you straighten his tie for him in passing or he hands you your glasses in the mornings, how you shave together side by side over the same sink, sharing responsibilities and favours and personal space. It doesn’t feel transactional, it feels like a partnership, in all senses of the word.

You thought sleeping with him would upset the delicate balance of your work relationship; if anything, it has levelled you both. It’s restorative. It’s tension that builds and ebbs with the sway of day to night, the slack in a mooring rope between a vessel and a harbour. After a fuck, he sleeps easier, though he still tosses at night like a restless dog, and even putting up with that, you wake with fresh, hormonal energy, ready to take on the day. Thoughts of him don’t plague you during work hours anymore, because he’s right there, and there he comfortably remains.

-

And in getting comfortable, you’re beginning to learn him, who he is with you, and to learn yourself again, and who you both are together. You learn that the shower sex is one of your favourites; there’s an efficiency in it, getting clean even as you get filthy, and also an intimacy, something about the surface tension of water and how it connects you, dripping from your lips as you kiss the back of his neck, coursing over your hands on his doughy hips as you pull yourself into him, and the loud smack of wet skin on wet skin. That, and you can be noisy and disgusting in the shower. He always comes with such a song, and you can enjoy the slick of his spend in your hand, smear it up over his belly like you’re blooding him, before it simply washes away down the drain. Fuck 30 minutes. You’ll fuck him until the water runs cold if it pleases you.

You learn that his favourite is when you ride him (despite his initial fear of it). He can lay there and be lazy with his thrusts, and still focus entirely upon you, like he’s merely there for your pleasure, an altar for you to glorify yourself on. Centre of the bed, his legs starfished under you, his hands tight around your thighs as you kneel and roll yourself down on him. He’s a slave to it, obsession in his eyes, gulping the sight of you: your chest out, tummy poking forth, shoulders back and arms hanging languid at your sides. And you learn you can come like this, without so much as a hand on your cock, just the rhythm and weight of your own body hugging him ocean-deep inside you, head thrown back in silent outcry at the hotel room ceiling, the dark blanket of night around you both.

And it’s his favourite for another reason: it’s the only way he can come when you do, the only way he can follow you into bliss and feel it in real time with you, the disc of the world and the ever-encroaching pale suspended for just a few moments as the space between you folds in on itself and there is no ‘him’ and no ‘you’, just us, the porch collapse of the self, and we bathe in the slatted glow of the streetlight outside our little room like it's the only light left in the universe.

He has to rise up to kiss you when that happens; he can’t bear it ending without a kiss.

And after that you learn that you should probably be doing more squats; saddling him, your knees always feel like that of a man twice your age the next day.

Days of knee pain and thigh strain. Nights of lather, rinse, rejoice.

-

You begin to get experimental; that starts when you playfully spank him in the bathroom, and then (his cheeks ruddy with shame) he asks you to do it again, but harder. And you decide that is a conversation that needs to be had before things get, well, intense, if not outright dangerous. Talk about it first, after all.

‘First,’ you say carefully, standing over him where he sits nervously fidgeting on the edge of the bed. ‘What won’t you do?’

He shakes his head. ‘Nothing. For you? I’ll do anything.’

‘We’ll see. Let’s start with what you want, then.’

He wants to be tied up, and that really shouldn’t surprise you. Wants to have his autonomy taken. Or, more accurately, he wants to surrender it. You think there must be something freeing in it, not having to make decisions or be responsible for himself, if only for a short while; to just lay back and think of Revachol.

You’re happy to indulge him that, though your knowledge of knot-tying isn’t extensive. He pulls out a pair of handcuffs and wiggles his eyebrows at you. ‘Absolutely not,’ you laugh. Instead, the Taube offers up a length of jute rope, and you have no idea where it came from, but you won’t look a gift hearse in the mouth.

He’s quite a sight laying there half-naked and bound, arms above his head with wrists lashed to the headboard. He grins at you with a kind of ‘what now?’ smugness about him. You decide you’ll take your time with this, use his imprisonment to really explore him. You take your gloves off with deliberate slowness.

There's a tenderness in your hands that he isn't expecting, quivering under featherlight touch as your fingers trace his details, hair and freckles, stretchmarks and scars. You find the bullet wound in his thigh, the little star-shaped hollow of it, still pink and soft with healing tissue almost a year later. He moans softly at that.

You can’t help but recall the tribunal, what little you remember of it, how it was over in no more than a few seconds and yet this wound consumed your entire being for days, how it bled into your hands and your gloves smelled of his blood for weeks after.

‘Hello, old friend,’ you murmur, and lay a kiss on the scar.

When you look up, Harry’s eyes are high tide.

‘Oh, stop that,’ you laugh, and slap his balls.

-

It’s getting harder to corral yourselves out the door in the mornings, especially when the pain lingers overnight and colours your entire day. There’s an awareness of each other, everywhere you go now, a feeling like sunburn, so present that it can’t be ignored. You’ve started staggering your comings and goings from the 37th, like they might smell it on you both. Faggots.

‘What about these rumours?’ you ask one evening as you’re passing the post-fuck cigarette back and forth. ‘All this “Mr and Mrs Cooper” business. I know we joke about it, but it’s clear people will talk, given that they had already been doing so, long before… this.’ You gesture down at the carnage of the bed, your limbs tangled in his, rotting in the wet patch, the miasma of fuckstink heavy over your bodies.

Harry takes a deep pull and, mouthful of smoke, just says: ‘Fuck the rumours.’ The aggression in it makes your asshole pucker. ‘What are they gonna do?’

‘We could get fired.’

He barks a laugh. ‘Me? Maybe. You? Unlikely. We? No chance.’

‘What world is this, in which you are certain about your job security and I am not?’

‘Lose two of their best detectives over a matter of what they do outside of work hours? They couldn’t afford to lose me over cocaine–and I was doing that inside work hours–they can’t afford to lose you over cock.’

He makes you laugh, louder than you expect, until suddenly you’re breathless with laughter. Mort de rire. ‘Fuck,’ you sob, hand over your face.

‘Don’t mind if I do.’

He rolls over atop you, and you do your ragdoll thing and absolutely let him do as he pleases and he absolutely lets you have it. He plunges back in without prep, without a condom–when did you stop caring about that?–without even a slow warming-up of his thrusts, he just goes straight to second gear and fucks you hard, hard as if he’s punishing you for your fear, that you could give a fuck about what anyone thinks of you getting fucked by Harrier Du Bois. He fucks you until you’re sore and sobbing, until you’re raw, and he’s right, you don’t give a fuck. He comes, shuddering and gasping, inside of you and you’re still hard when he pulls out, dripping a trail of himself out of you.

‘Fuck, that was good,’ he moans. ‘Sorry, I should have–’

You shake your head at him. ‘I let you. But… if you make a mess,’ you warn him, ‘you are obligated to clean up after yourself.’

He stares love-drunk down at you for a moment, uncomprehending, and then a grin blossoms under his beard, and he goes to work. As Harry is licking his own spend out of you, your heels resting on his shoulders and your hand leisurely stroking your cock against his cheek, you think that no rumour could possibly convey the depths of his depravity, let alone yours.

-

If Harry has one complaint about your ‘depravity’, it’s that you are quiet about it. You cover your mouth whenever you come, huff without grunting through your thrusts, barely talk at all unless he speaks first. He wants more, just as he did that second night, wants to hear your fuck noises, wants to hear you say filthy words and cry filthier sounds. You are naturally quiet, and he knows this, but he also knows there’s a restraint there, that you would scream bloody murder into the night if you knew the night had no ears.

One night, Revachol gifts you both with a rare thunderstorm, and her throes are plenty cover enough for you to scream into, but you still need convincing.

He has you on your back, your legs hugged tight around his waist so his belly presses down on your cock as he takes you. His thrusts are slow and hard (not his usual frenetic, goal-seeking humps), measured in a way that has you groaning at the apex of each. He’s so rough with you, but it’s calculated even when he hurts you. And he knows he has to hurt you, to really tweeze those sounds from you.

‘C’mon Kim,’ he grumbles into your neck, grazing his teeth there like a threat. ‘You’re gonna scream for me.’

Lighting clashes outside and his features flash with the force of nature; he looks feral with his kelp hair hanging low over his brow, sweat beads trailing down into the thick of his beard, more cryptid than man, and you suddenly forget why you’re holding back, if there ever was a reason at all. You beg this creature to fuck you harder, harder, and he does, and you’re still begging him–‘Fuck me! Fuck me! Fuck me!’–until the words dissolve, and you’re just yelling into the abyss, incoherent, ebullient.

It could be anything that makes you scream for him. A snarl he makes, that one errant thrust that hits you right, the pain that shoots through your skin as he bites you, the savage slap of thunder in the night. He tells you to come, and you come for him, crying out until your lungs are ash.

Harry is so tender with you after that, kissing you everywhere, running fingers back through your hair, pressing his ear against your sternum just so he can hear the shallow little wheezes in your chest as you come down, your heart beating like a swallow’s wings. The storm rages on outside, rain lashing the windows, and you’ve never known a peace quite like this. You’re asleep even before he pulls out.